A New Decade of Changes & Challenges
Fifteen years ago, a national healthcare debate was raging. It took room-size mainframes to keep a hospital running, and critical information exchange usually happened at land-line speed.
As 2010 rolls in, we’re a lot closer to getting a national healthcare strategy, and whether you love or hate the final product, a major difference in the discussion this time around is the role that new technology must play. The federal government is backing up its calls for IT solutions with stimulus funding and a mandate for hospitals to implement electronic health records that can follow a patient anywhere.
The debate will continue, and migration away from paper will be painful for some. But many health IT innovators saw EHRs’ potential to improve patient care years ago, and started building systems before the government pulled out its carrots and sticks.
Then as now, the ultimate goal was better patient care.
There’s still a long way to go, of course. In the following pages, CMIO looks at the difficulties that electronic medication ordering and management present for the EHR. Health IT leaders also weigh in on productivity losses—and gains—as large scale EHR implementations go live. Hospitals must figure out what constitutes a successful EHR deployment: Is a return to pre-EHR physician productivity the top priority? If some patients get the information they need from an email or telephone consultation, and physicians are therefore seeing fewer patients in the office, does that mean there’s been a loss of productivity?
As health IT continues to evolve and takes an ever-more critical role in patient care, the role of the CMIO will increase in importance. With this issue, CMIO becomes a monthly publication, dedicated as always to delivering the information you need to keep innovating.
Happy New Year indeed!