As healthcare organizations adapt to the increasing importance of IT by hiring new executives to oversee digital transformation, it can be difficult to navigate the plethora of tech-related titles.
Aneesh Chopra, who served as the first U.S. chief technology officer under former President Barack Obama and is now president of CareJourney, an Arlington, Va.-based healthcare analytics company, described in an interview with Business Insider a useful framework for dividing IT responsibilities.
A CTO, according to Mr. Chopra, should focus on the use of data to improve operations, while a CIO will manage security efforts to protect that data. As IT systems become more elaborate and extensive, oversight of infrastructure and the applications running within will require two separate teams and dedicated leaders.
Beyond those two roles, Mr. Chopra said, healthcare firms may also benefit from installing a chief data officer, as New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System did earlier this year. Ideally, this role will take a more patient-centric focus than the CTO and CIO, managing data-driven patient care efforts rather than the high-level analysis or protection of that data.
Read more here.
More articles on health IT:
Dana-Farber, Philips data-driven precision oncology platform goes live
Baptist Health South Florida appoints 1st VP for innovation
Health tech leaders release privacy guidelines for consumer health data