From the CMIO: Overlap of Play & Work
I hope the staff and readers of CMIO had a safe and restful holiday. I spent New Year’s in Riviera Maya, Mexico, with my family (wife and three college-aged children). The decision on where to go was based on input from my children: somewhere warm, with a beach and outside the U.S. I took these data and hit the internet—it’s amazing how many sites provide decision support tools to guide choices, equipped with the ability to “drill down” and see details and reviews of prospective resorts. The entire process was intuitive and graphic-based.
Sound familiar? The success of healthcare organizations will be determined by our ability to aggregate information, standardize it across platforms, present it for analysis in an intuitive and clear fashion, as well as provide decision support based on the data and analysis. It is our role as CMIOs to determine the system requirements, provide input on the user interface and ensure utilization by our clinician colleagues.
Is it just reality or is it sad that I needed to know about internet access at the resort? The need to continually stay current with emails and issues at work (and Philadelphia Flyers scores) is becoming increasingly important for CMIOs. I average 110 emails a day, so coming back from a week-long vacation to 1,000 emails makes re-entry much harder. This need for constant access to both administrative and clinical information is an accelerating trend that in healthcare. Clinicians are demanding access (from anywhere and at any time) to all of their patient information; and the CMIO must facilitate the discussion of what information is truly needed and necessary.
I discovered the resort lobby areas were wireless and the guest rooms had wired access, which was not adequate for my iPad. The solution was a portable wireless router. My children could then borrow the router and use it in their rooms to connect using their smartphones. This need for access using multiple devices is another important trend in health IT. The days of COWs and laptops being used by clinicians may be numbered. Providers are asking (demanding?) for the ability to see their census, look up lab results, complete E/M billing, view PACS images and enter data (i.e., orders) from any device and anywhere inside/outside the walls of the hospital or office. CMIOs are being asked to weigh in on whether these requests are worth the required investments in hardware and infrastructure. Is there true clinical benefit to providing such pervasive access, or is the cool factor driving these initiatives?
Data, decision support, devices and access—just a few of the trends keeping CMIOs awake at night. Let me know how these trends are impacting you and what you think of our articles this month at donaldlevickmd@cmio.net.
Sound familiar? The success of healthcare organizations will be determined by our ability to aggregate information, standardize it across platforms, present it for analysis in an intuitive and clear fashion, as well as provide decision support based on the data and analysis. It is our role as CMIOs to determine the system requirements, provide input on the user interface and ensure utilization by our clinician colleagues.
Is it just reality or is it sad that I needed to know about internet access at the resort? The need to continually stay current with emails and issues at work (and Philadelphia Flyers scores) is becoming increasingly important for CMIOs. I average 110 emails a day, so coming back from a week-long vacation to 1,000 emails makes re-entry much harder. This need for constant access to both administrative and clinical information is an accelerating trend that in healthcare. Clinicians are demanding access (from anywhere and at any time) to all of their patient information; and the CMIO must facilitate the discussion of what information is truly needed and necessary.
I discovered the resort lobby areas were wireless and the guest rooms had wired access, which was not adequate for my iPad. The solution was a portable wireless router. My children could then borrow the router and use it in their rooms to connect using their smartphones. This need for access using multiple devices is another important trend in health IT. The days of COWs and laptops being used by clinicians may be numbered. Providers are asking (demanding?) for the ability to see their census, look up lab results, complete E/M billing, view PACS images and enter data (i.e., orders) from any device and anywhere inside/outside the walls of the hospital or office. CMIOs are being asked to weigh in on whether these requests are worth the required investments in hardware and infrastructure. Is there true clinical benefit to providing such pervasive access, or is the cool factor driving these initiatives?
Data, decision support, devices and access—just a few of the trends keeping CMIOs awake at night. Let me know how these trends are impacting you and what you think of our articles this month at donaldlevickmd@cmio.net.