March 2, 2016 | By Pam Baker
Given sweeping changes in healthcare ranging from the Affordable Care Act to precision medicine, most healthcare organizations find traditional health IT leaders insufficient for adeptly shifting the organization from volume to value-based payment models. That’s because the traditional CIO has plenty of technical skills but rarely has clinical skills or experience. Enter the new clinical IT executive to flip the IT model from tech-centric to patient-care-centric. And, yes, these new executives have mad tech skills, particularly in big data.
HIMSS, a nonprofit focused on improving health through information technology, just released its 27th annual leadership survey which is designed to identify generalized trends within U.S. healthcare IT. Seventy-one percent of the 282 IT executives and professionals in U.S. hospitals and health systems surveyed reported they employ a clinical IT executive. The researchers found that, based on analysis of a multitude of issues, that approach is working.
“The presence of a clinical IT executive in a healthcare provider organization appears to have a notable impact on the organization’s orientation towards health IT,” according to the report.
Check out the infographic with that report for an overview of other findings. Suffice it to say that most health organizations find it critical to have a clinical IT executive onboard – not to replace the CIO but to better align technology use to business goals through an executive with equally strong clinical and technical knowledge.
“Clinical IT executives clearly possess a unique and valued perspective regarding the criticality of health IT on an organization’s patient care focused efforts, and this orientation appears to be gaining traction in many organizations” said Lorren Pettit, vice president, research for HIMSS, in a statement to the press.
“And while clinical IT executives are part of the overall executive team in many healthcare organizations, their presence is not universally true. We will definitely continue to explore and track these issues in future HIMSS research studies.”
Specific areas respondents found health IT to be critical, as opposed to simply supportive, include:
- Clinical integration (74%)
- Primary care provider efficiency (72%)
- Mandated quality metrics improvement (68%)
- Care coordination (67%)
And, yes, big data and small data too are the very backbone of these efforts. Thus we have a new breed of big data specialists.
While the position of clinical IT executive grew organically in response to pressures in meeting mandates and profiting in spite of them, don’t be surprised if other industries follow suit and add executives primed to flip the IT model.
For more:
– see the press release
– see the report
– see the white paper
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