1. Appoint a chief medical information officer. Establishing an official role for a clinician to spearhead healthcare information technology initiatives is fundamental to aligning HIT initiatives to clinical strategies, says Ms. Crowley. The CMIO could also serve as a better liaison between administrators and physicians who use the HIT than a non-clinician.
“Traditionally, the CIO or IT director would report to the CFO, but what we did was have me report to the medical director, who is also the CMIO,” Ms. Crowley says. “The reason for this is a CFO’s job is to look at operations from a financial perspective and analyze returns on investment. It’s hard to get the executive board and the CFO to understand the value in putting in some of these systems because they are expensive and complex. The CMIO, whose goal is to take care of the patient, understands it much more clearly.”
2. Expand HIT applications and products. After 2008, Columbia Memorial executives decided to move beyond simply using an HIS system that manages and coordinates finances to adding and expanding its HIT to include more advanced products.
“Starting in 2008, executives started really assessing what other products were out there for us and how to either optimize what we were doing or add more modules,” Ms. Crowley says. “Since then, we purchased a patient care manager, which has applications ranging from physician order entries to physician documentation.”
3. Increase IT staff. With more hospitals scrambling to implement electronic medical records at their facilities, it’s necessary to remember additional staff support will be needed to ease the transition from paper to electronic operations. Expanding IT staff to include project management and clinical IT support can help reap the benefits of HIT implementation much more quickly.
“When I first came to Columbia Memorial in 2008, we had one nursing analyst and one lab analyst,” Ms. Crowley says. “The IT staff was very minimal, and we have since added three more clinical support staff. One of them is the clinical coordinator, who helps with project management and application support for outpatient care, like EMR implementation at our physician practices.”
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