Voices of experience
 | |
| Mary Stevens, Editor |
“For 15 years, the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems (AMDIS) been saying ‘we need to do this, here’s all the benefits, here’s how we do it, here’s why we do it’ and everyone said: ‘Thank you very much, we’re busy,’ ” says Howard M. Landa, MD, from the departments of medical informatics and pediatric urology at Hawaii Permanente Medical Group, and CMIO at Alameda County Medical Center in Oakland, Calif., and vice chairman of the AMDIS Physician-Computer Connection Symposium to be held next week in Ojai, Calif.
Then, “two little words came out,” Landa says. “There’s a lot of energy but also a lot of fear, [partly because] we’ve been called on what we’ve been saying for years, but also because are there really the resources to do it, are there the people we can tap to do it when everyone’s going to be trying to do this at the same time?”
Like CMIOs everywhere, convention attendees are trying to answer these questions, sometimes loudly. “You get some amazing ideas coming out, Landa said. “I hope it’s going to be a very energetic meeting because of all that swirl.”
Picture a group of 150 to 200 physicians, most of whom are in the CMIO role. “The meeting tends to be very interactive. I usually tell presenters to prepare 30 minutes of material and don’t be surprised if you don’t get through it. Real interactive discussions tend to erupt because it’s a reasonable-size group, and because you’ve got people who have been doing this for a long time and know each other well. The presentations create fodder for those interchanges.”
This year’s presentation roster includes all things meaningful use, from chronic disease management with data collection to clinical decision support, to more peripheral technology such as social networking and how it applies to medical informatics.
“In the past, it’s been very heavily focused on implementation and CPOE, how to do the change management, how to actually get those things done. Now we’re moving on to how do we get it integrated into workflow without degrading [medical] system performance.”
“The return on investment that you get comes way after implementation, when you return to the users and optimize and re-engineer the processes,” Landa says. “At implementation, you’re so focused on just getting it done, you basically electronify a paper process.” To really understand it, integrate it with workflows and align it with you strategic , you have to come back and touch the system again with those things in mind, he says. “That’s where you get the real return on your investment, beyond meaningful use dollars.”
Stay tuned for our coverage of the AMDIS Symposium next week.
Mary Stevens, Editor
mstevens@trimedmedia.com