XChange Events Announces 2012 Healthcare IT Summit XCellence Award Winners

Both Payers and Providers Recognized for Innovation and Driving Value

Held from Nov. 11 to 13 at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress, Orlando, FL, the 2012 Healthcare IT Summit explored the changing face of healthcare IT for both payer and provider communities. The event is the only IT-focused conference that brings together both sides of the industry, providing education and insight on future market drivers, business trends, economic factors and technology opportunities impacting the healthcare IT market.

Vendors with solutions for both payers and providers were recognized for demonstrating the most exceptional products, services and presentations during the Summit. Here's a photo of the winners.

Winners include:

Best Technology Solution – Payer: Scale Computing
Best Technology Solution – Provider: Fortinet
Best Case Study Presentation – Payer: Health Solutions Plus
Best Case Study Presentation – Provider: InterSystems
Best Demonstration of Value/ROI – Payer: Fortinet
Best Demonstration of Value/ROI – Provider: Scale Computing
Best Emerging Vendor – Payer & Provider: Scale Computing
Best of Show – Payer: HealthEdge

Best of Show – Provider: Xirrus

"By bringing together industry analysts, IT executives and vendors to collaborate and share ideas, the 2012 Healthcare IT Summit shines a spotlight on the changing face of Healthcare technology," said Robert C. DeMarzo, Senior Vice President of Strategic Content, UBM Channel. "The XCellence Awards recognize the organizations that are driving innovation, demonstrating value and helping to navigate an increasingly dynamic industry. Congratulations to all the winners."

VP Of Care Management At John Hopkins HealthCare To Speak at the 2012 Healthcare IT Summit

Linda Dunbar, PhD, RN and vice president of care management at Johns Hopkins HealthCare will be speaking at the 2012 Healthcare IT Summit that runs Nov. 11-13 at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando, Fla. Dunbar's session, "Integration and Innovation: New Care Delivery Models and the Technology to Support Them," will be extremely beneficial for both provider and payer attendees.

Dunbar will be speaking about Population Health strategies and new models of care delivery in support of improving the health, and decreasing the cost, of the care of a population.

"The model I will describe has been implemented at Johns Hopkins Medicine and is comprised of an Integrated Delivery Team at the site of primary care," said Dunbar.

The model addresses primary, secondary and tertiary prevention and care of a population with an integrated care system. In the JHM model of care, the Primary Care Provider, a Nurse Case Manager, a behavioral health specialist and a community health worker complete an assessment of behavioral and clinical needs, complete a rounding process and then work to support self-management activities, explained Dunbar. 

"The biggest takeaway from my session,  for healthcare IT executives, will be a better understanding of the importance of IT in supporting the interdisciplinary team in their activities, aggregating data and measuring outcomes," said Dunbar.

Here's a little more background on Dr. Dunbar...

Dr. Dunbar serves as vice president of care management at Johns Hopkins HealthCare. In her role as Vice President for the past ten years at JHHC, Dr. Dunbar directs the 220 staff members in the divisions of Population Health Management, Behavioral Health, and Research and Development. Since 1997, Dr. Dunbar has led the department to create, deliver and evaluate innovate population health management strategies in the areas of single and multiple chronic diseases, behavioral conditions and substance abuse disease. 

Dr. Dunbar holds an adjunct faculty appointment at the JHU School of Nursing and Bloomberg School of Public Health, and frequently teaches and lectures on such topics as managed care, population health strategies, health policy and reform, risk adjustment, and research and evaluation.

Dr. Dunbar’s dissertation work, entitled “Alternative Methods of Identifying Children with Special Health Care Needs: Implications for Medicaid Programs”, explored the use of predictive models and risk adjustment in populations of children with chronic conditions. Dr. Dunbar has published in peer-reviewed journals on chronic illness in infants and children, risk-adjustment methodology, predictive modeling in high-risk patient identification, health policy for children and adults, pay-for-performance and quality, primary care and population health strategies. She has served as a consultant in the Disease Management industry and for State Medicaid Agencies and health plans. Dr. Dunbar speaks and consults nationally and internationally about risk-adjustment and population health strategies.

Dr. Dunbar completed 40 credits in the Master’s of Business Administration program at Johns Hopkins University in early 1984-1988, a MS in 2000 and PhD in 2005 from University of Maryland in Nursing and Health Policy.

The TriZetto Group Plays The Role Of ‘Global Solution Partner’

As the health-care industry continues to change and evolve, IT vendors are realizing that they must step up to help payers and providers seamlessly transform their organizations from a technology standpoint. Emil Peters, vice president of Hospital and Health System Markets at The TriZetto Group, shares his message with health-care CIOs, The TriZetto Group’s new solutions and improvements to its flagship offering, how it’s innovating and what he is hearing from its customers and partners.

HCITS: The TriZetto Group is attending the Healthcare IT Summit, which attracts CIOs of health-care payer and provider organizations. What is your message to them?

Peters: I think I would say, ‘Welcome to the most interesting time in the most important industry in the world that impacts every member of every society.' We bring comprehensive experience and decades of knowledge from supporting risk-bearing entities to both payers and providers. As we enter new and innovative models that seek to solve the global health-care affordability crisis that we collectively share, we think our solutions will help new stakeholders play a pivotal role. We look to support and contribute to this new world not just by being an IT vendor, but also by being a global solution partner that supports its clients as they transform themselves.

HCITS: What new deployment methodologies and architectures is your flagship solution providing today?

Peters: With the payers’ drive to become more efficient, and the providers’ goal to enter new models without breaking their already broken piggy banks, we see an opportunity to be relevant and supportive in both spaces. TriZetto has not only made investments in functional capabilities to deepen our ability to support a variety of customers, but we have made some key acquisitions that extend our capabilities to address what these new payer/providers clients will ultimately look like.

Our GatewayEDI acquisition, last year, has given us tremendous insight and capability into physician revenue cycle management (RCM) and real-time payment capabilities. Recently we bolstered that investment in provider infrastructure by bringing NHXS on board to help group practices obtain accurate claim payments and recover underpayments. Continuing this expansion, we've just announced the acquisition of ClaimLogic, a medical claims and payment processing company that has serves hospitals and large medical practices. By combining all these capabilities, TriZetto is building an integrated, real-time payer-provider technology platform that helps health plans and physicians achieve efficiency and effective care.

HCITS: How are you innovating and driving innovation from a technology standpoint?

Peters: Having just spent a few days with our TriZetto technology team, I can't be more positive about our technical innovation trajectory. We continue to evolve our solutions to meet the ever changing demands of both our payer and provider clients. Being able to provide flexibility with a focus on TCO is important and the ability to scale is something that we think is going to be vital for payers and providers moving forward. When you think of information as the new currency for global population health management, the ability to flex with our customers is paramount. We're truly excited to be in position to lead with our clients, but it also brings a tremendous amount of responsibility that we are ready for.

HCITS: What are you hearing from your IT executive partners and customers?

Peters: There is a sense of tremendous opportunity, while at the same time there is a lot of risk. Providers, specifically, are catching their breath from the first wave of Meaningful Use and are getting ready to run and jump into stage two. Payers are looking to drive administrative efficiency, increase automation and improve the cost and quality of care. It's no surprise that everyone is a bit weary of all these new models that will require heavy doses of information to succeed. That's why we think we can play an impartial and transparent role in helping them mitigate risks and maximize opportunities. There is a lot of opportunity as I mentioned earlier, but it's below the surface and going to require some excavation to get there. If you're going to excavate, you're going to need the right tools and capabilities and our clients are coming to us asking for answers.

HCITS: What is your biggest piece of advice, from a vendor perspective, to our Healthcare CIO audience?

Peters: I think it would be to specialize and know your end destination. Know your place in the market and what your value proposition is. There will be a lot of iteration in order to get to that final destination and undoubtedly it will be an arduous journey, but if you know the end point and the way points to get there, the organizational risk can be manageable. To reuse my boat analogy, you need to plan for the whole journey and not just the rapids or the calm waters. Your equipment needs to serve you in the way you need to be served at the time you need it. Planning with that end in mind will help you get the right balance of people, process and technology. It sounds elementary, but it's really important.

Mimecast Helps Ease The Pain Of Health-Care IT

With all of the IT challenges within the health-care industry today, IT executives are looking for a little piece of sanity that a good vendor could provide them. Miguel Llopiz, vice president of the health-care sector at Mimecast, finds it remarkable how health-care CIOs handle all of their day-to-day responsibilities while still finding time and resources for innovation. Mimecast’s goal is to take some of the pain, and cost, away from these IT executives from cloud to email environments.

HCITS: How does Mimecast cater to health-care payer and provider IT executives? What are you doing in the health-care space?

Llopiz: Mimecast brings to bear a very powerful mix of capabilities aimed at distinct value propositions—compliancy and collaboration—while leveraging the cloud to attain much lower costs. We provide a cloud-based service that delivers collaborative HIPAA security and privacy, and compliance enablers that enhance the current mail platform, while reducing complexity and costs. We expand the capabilities that the current email system delivers while driving huge efficiencies in the IT organization. It completely aligns with health-care initiatives to drive costs down while delivering better service.

HCITS: Are there any new products or services that you would like to share with our audience?

Llopiz: We have spent a lot of time speaking to our current health-care customers as well as prospective clients, thus, have been able to align our existing suite of cloud-based services to their individual requirements. Additionally, we have learned that many are using either an inefficient mix of independent products or using such products in a manner for which they were not intended. Either way spells deficiencies and skyrocketing costs. What we are doing is delivering a unified approach to email management, where customers can leverage investments or consolidate disparate applications at much reduced cost and complexity.

HCITS: Do you have a specific example of this unified approach?

Llopiz: Our mobility products and services allow for BYOD deployment and bring 100 percent continual access to email, and archive for the mobile health-care worker. Even better, it does this seamlessly and inexpensively. Of the many new capabilities we are delivering, I am excited about our MSO4 (Mimecast Services for Outlook), which tightly integrate with the user interface and deliver contextual “on demand” retention, security and privacy policies. This allows IT to manage the compliance burden through good procedural mechanics. In addition, we are investing in some revolutionary technologies that provide high-level analytics that extract particular insights from our archive. In the future, we can shape these tools to the specific needs of not only our health-care clients, but also address custom requirements for many of our customers.

HCITS: How does Mimecast help health-care IT executives stay ahead of the curve in the health-care industry today?

Llopiz: This is very basic: We take the pain and cost of managing their email environment, thus liberating IT staff to direct their attention to the many other areas and initiatives that they have to support—again, doing more with fewer headaches. Our mantra includes our five Cs of IT: reducing cost and complexity while offering compliant and continuous collaboration.

HCITS: What is the biggest IT trend that you are seeing in the health-care industry today, and how are you addressing that trend?

Llopiz: IT executives are burdened with a tremendous amount of responsibilities, applications to support and initiatives to manage. Frankly, I don’t know how some of these folks do it! They have less budget, time and resources at their disposal. This presents a unique scenario in that they are also being asked to maintain an increasing portfolio of services, compliance initiatives, resources, applications, thus, vendor relationships. The challenges are great and the solutions are many, but the real efficiency is in ensuring these solutions address real concerns and not become shelf-ware. Our customers are looking for ways to leverage the cloud and bring about cost effectiveness and simplicity, and most offerings come in an all-or-nothing format. What we can provision are ways for them to leverage the efficiencies cloud technologies can potentially deliver, but not have to face the mountainous challenges in bringing these technologies to full use in a short time period. We can activate our services in days for incredibly low costs.

HCITS: What will Mimecast be presenting at the Healthcare IT Summit?

Llopiz: We will be showcasing success stories from our broad customer base and introducing new products and enhancements, as well as new partnerships that will please current and future clients.

LogiXML Will Release New Version of Its Product In Early November

The health-care industry is under more pressure than almost any other industry. Its environment is changing faster than most in respect to what health-care IT executives have to do with their data. Ken Chow, chief marketing officer of LogiXML, believes that LogiXML’s health-care dashboards, reporting and analytics tools enable IT executives in this space to adapt to the rapidly changing industry landscape. In this interview, Chow discusses LogiXML’s newest version of its product, which will be released jsut in time for the Healthcare IT Summit in November, what they will be showing at the conference and how they are catering to the health-care CIO audience.

HCITS: How does LogiXML cater to health-care payer and provider IT executives? What are you doing in the health-care space?

Chow: We provide a way of producing the analytics and reporting health-care CIOs need across multiple disparate databases. Typically, the two main drivers of their concern are speed and having fragmented data sources; our solution addresses these issues as it provides a web-based platform that adapts to the changing health-care environment quickly and in an organized manner. The only other major way in which I think we are really outstanding in that area is that we provide a fine level of security, which I think is important for all health-care IT executives.

HCITS: Are there any new products or services that you would like to share with our audience?

Chow: This year, in early November, we are going to have a major release of a new product coming out that provides even more intuitive and easy-to-use interfaces and visuals. I think that’s important, because many health-care payer and provider institutions are delivering metrics that need to be interpreted on-the-fly both quickly and easily, so we are just making the whole visual impression even better. We plan to show it off at the Healthcare IT Summit.

HCITS: How does LogiXML help health-care IT executives stay ahead of the curve in the health-care industry today?

Chow: These individuals are certainly being thrown a lot of curveballs both from the regulatory arena as well as the increased competitive environment they are in. So, we give them a way of reacting more quickly. The same agility I spoke of in the first questions—the ability to get to multiple databases, get to them securely, and to really quickly make and change the views of the things they are looking at—is how we help them stay ahead. They know this industry and they are having a difficult enough time predicting these trends. They need to adapt and change the way they adapt and change to their data really quickly in order to stay ahead.

HCITS: What is the biggest IT trend you are seeing in the health-care industry today, and how are you addressing that trend?

Chow: The single biggest trend would be about cost control and reimbursement, and much of that has come by way of the change in the regulatory environment as well as the industry structures that have arisen to handle it. Things like the notion of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), and so forth, have changed the landscape of how both payer and provider institutions have to look at their data. If they are going to adapt to these new systems, particularly the new Medicaid and Medicare programs, they are going to have to really stay on top of that data. Cost control and reimbursement is probably one of the pain points—it certainly doesn’t take a back seat to patient care, which has always been a priority—but, cost control and reimbursement is the fastest-growing trend today.

HCITS: Please share a customer example of your success in this space.

Chow: NACHRI (the National Association of Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions), which recently merged with CHCA and is now together known as the Children’s Hospital Association, use our product’s portal to allow all of their members to compare their operational metrics to their peers. They are able to help their members operate efficiently and make sure their memberships are as cost-efficient as possible by benchmarking, sharing and collaborating on best practices.

In contrast, Partners In Health has actually instituted our product to deliver patient care and direct patient metrics onto the floor of the care institutions so that the hospital staff, nursing staff, doctors and administrators can quickly take a look at care statistics and available resources to match the care needs. These are just two examples of the types of things that we do and offer.

HCITS: What will LogiXML be presenting at the Healthcare IT Summit?

Chow: We will be showing off the newest version of our product with some very compelling visuals, as l mentioned earlier. I think the main “aha” moment that most of the IT executives will have with our technology will be when they see how fast it is, how easy it is to hook it up to all of their data and the level of role-based security that it provides. The main thrust of the product will happen at the Healthcare IT Summit—we will be talking about the new enhancements and the release so we are really excited for the conference.

Todd Park, U.S. CTO, On HHS & Healthcare IT

Todd Park, the former Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 2009, still has high interest in the healthcare industry and how it is utilizing technology for the American public. Prior to joining HHS, Park co-founded Athenahealth and co-led its development into one of the most innovative health IT companies in the industry.

Although he is now the Federal Chief Technology Officer, Park still keeps involved in the healthcare community by creating the Health Data Initiative (HDI) Forum and the annual Health Datapalooza event, which is a public-private collaboration that encourages innovators to utilize health data to develop applications to raise awareness of health and health system performance and spark community action to improve health.

Q: What is on the horizon for HHS? What is the biggest innovation in progress in the effort to revolutionize the release and use of health data?

Park: HHS has been the lead agency for the health data initiative and is continuing to expand the amount of data that is being available, readable and is continuing to broaden awareness of entrepreneurs, innovators and the public about this data and its availability as resource to power innovation. There’s a lot going on there across multiple dimensions.

For example, CMS (Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services), which is part of HHS, has very powerful data and has just launched a new office called The Office for Information Products and Data Analytics. This is an office that is dedicated to improving access to and utilization of data, both internally at CMS and externally, in order to improve health and 
care.

Q: Among your achievements at HHS were the launch of programs such as the consumer website HealthCare.gov, the Health Data Initiative and the HDI forum. What was the thought process behind the creation of these projects and how did they come to fruition?

Park: Well, HealthCare.gov was a requirement of The Affordable Care Act so that’s where that project came from. The Health Data Initiative came from earlier conversations that I had with Bill Corr, deputy secretary of HHS, who really wanted us to think about how HHS can deliver higher social return on all of the data that HHS had as a priority. There were other ideas that were germinated from innovative career civil servants at HHS who came to me with amazing ideas, which we then crystalized and put into action. Something that I’ve learned from this is that great ideas can come form anywhere and anyone and as innovation leaders, it is very important to look everywhere for the next great idea that can then be turned into something wonderful for the American people.

Q&A With Todd Park, U.S. CTO

Federal Chief Technology Officer Todd Park has a vision for changing the way American citizens interact with technology. We had an opportunity to discuss those initiatives with Park, who was appointed Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 2009. Prior to joining HHS, Park co-founded Athenahealth and co-led its development into one of the most innovative health IT companies in the industry. Many of our questions came from XChange Events advisory board members.

Q: Please tell us about the digital government strategy—how will it help the American people, and what you are doing to drive that strategy forward?

Park: U.S. CIO Steve VanRoekel and I rolled out the digital government strategy in May, which seeks to do three things:

1. Put government at citizens’ fingertips and literally bring government to mobile devices, and any device in general, that citizens are using.
2. Buy technology in a certain way that gives bigger bang for the taxpayer buck.
3. Move even more energetically and strongly in the direction of open data.

Q: Why is it important to make government data open and machine-readable?

Park: This is important because if you open up the data and make it machine-readable, it becomes easier able to power innovative digital government services. And, even more importantly, it opens the data in usable form so that all of the other “smart people” in the world—developers, innovators and entrepreneurs—can take our data and turn it into magic. They can turn it into new products or services that can improve American lives, help grow our economy and create jobs.

Q: What is one of the key initiatives that you are pursuing to catapult the digital government strategy forward?

Park: One of the key initiatives that is driving the digital government strategy forward is the open data initiatives program. This program seeks to not just liberate government data in machine-readable form, but also catalyze the development of an ecosystem of innovation that utilizes that data and educate innovators and entrepreneurs about that data. Through a series of meet-ups, code-a-thons and datapaloozas, we are able to celebrate the wide range of innovations that people are already pursuing.

Q: What is the Presidential Innovation Fellows program? How will it impact the state of our health care industry and the American government as a whole?

Park: The Presidential Innovation Fellows program is a program that we launched simultaneous with the digital government strategy. It’s a program that aims to bring together the amazing innovators from outside the government and the best innovators inside government. We then create agile teams that aim to deliver game-changing solutions in six months.

Q: At what point does the federal government start leveraging this country’s IT infrastructure and talent as opposed to developing its own?

Park: I think that moment is now. The central thrust of our approach with open data initiatives and the digital government strategy is that we shouldn’t build the tools that should be useful to citizens ourselves; we should open up that data so innovators outside of government can leverage our data to build useful services and applications with their infrastructure, technology, ingenuity and people.

So if we want to maximize the social return on taxpayer investment in government data, we know that we can’t just have the government build tools on it, but instead have everyone else build tools on the data to help the public.

Q: What’s your plan to deal with “Policy Lag” where the current federal policies have not kept up with the advancement of technology?

Park: Initiatives like the digital government strategy can close that gap dramatically.  If you think about the implications of a move like open data, what we’re doing is future-proofing the U.S. government from a technology standpoint because we are saying, “we are going to open up our data and when the world evolves, it will utilize that data in a number of ways.” It allows our data to evolve and advance at the same speed that technology is advancing.

Q: Small businesses continue to struggle to get a fair share of the federal government IT pie. What are some actions the federal government is taking to enhance SMB opportunities?

Park: RFP-EZ.  One of the features of the Presidential Innovation Fellows program is that it is both bringing in 20 people to be literal fellows, and it also is an opportunity for others to engage as well. You can sign up and provide input from wherever you are. We are looking for folks to join the networks to provide support and ideas to each of the projects. It gives small businesses, and anyone else, the opportunity to provide input and insight. To sign up you can go to white.gov/innovationfellows.

Q: If you could give our diverse IT executive audience one piece of advice, what would it be?

Park: There is immense innovation talent locked in your organization and the most important thing you can do as an innovation or IT leader is to unleash that talent and unleash that mojo. Embrace the power of the lean start-up approach to change management (an idea first established by Eric Ries). The final piece of advice is to embrace the power of open innovation and to embrace the idea of Joy’s law. It is to recognize that if you came up with lots of other people to get something done, you will actually deliver much better results, much faster with a much lower cost than if you try to do it all yourself. 

Q: What is the day in the life of Todd Park as the CTO of the U.S.?

Park: Crazy and wonderful! About 80 percent of my time is spent functioning as the virtual CEO and leader of a set of high-priority initiatives and projects that I am responsible for leading the execution of, and delivering results. The other 20 percent of my time is being a senior adviser that provides council and ideas and other kinds of assistance on issues as they arise. 

Healthcare IT Guy On How To Get Started in Healthcare IT

Health Administration Degrees shared with us an interview they recently conducted with Shahid Shah, also known as the Healthcare IT Guy in his popular blog.


In the interview, Shah discusses how to get started in healthcare IT as well as how consumer technologies, like smart phones and tablets, are affecting this industry.


You can find the interview on their homepage. In their video player, simply choose this interview on the right-hand sidebar. Enjoy!

D.C. Bound For Health Datapalooza Event

Mr. Healthcare CIO will be at the upcoming Health Datapalooza (HDI Forum III) event in Washington D.C. next week--if you see me there, please say hello! I am always interested in making new industry connections, finding speakers for our Healthcare IT Summit and other XChange events, finding industry bloggers and writers to contribute to our Healthcare IT Strategies newsletter and, most importantly, to make new friends!


I am greatly looking forward to the unbelievable line-up that the HDI Forum team has graciously planned--the event is going to be jam-packed with industry leaders, IT executives, CIOs, CMOs, doctors, Gartner analysts and more. And, to top it all off, Jon Bon Jovi will be there! LOOK WHO'S COMING


Todd Park, U.S. CTO, will be giving the opening keynote address on Tuesday, June 5 at 9:10 AM...see his blog post on The Health Care Blog about the event. 


I am so excited to have the opportunity to attend this event and am looking forward to getting some great coverage while learning from these extraordinary industry leaders. 

SEE THE DAY 1 AGENDA HERE

SEE THE DAY 2 AGENDA HERE

Please follow @MrHealthcareCIO for up-to-the-minute happenings at the event.

CIOs Should Align With The C-Suite On IT Budgets

The final decision-making role of the CIO within an organization’s leadership team is being widely debated and discussed by both CIOs and line-of-business executives. CIOs are realizing they will have more influence inside their organizations if they partner more effectively with others in the executive suite.

To shed some light on this topic, XChange events and IDC Health Insights conducted a study of CIOs who attended our recent Healthcare IT Summit and the results were somewhat surprising. Only 20 percent said they are the final decision-maker on IT budgets with a slight majority—58 percent—stating that they are on the team that makes decisions on IT budgets. The remaining 22 percent said that they have an influence on budgets, but are not responsible for hard decision-making.

These results show that the large majority (78 percent) of IT leaders in the healthcare space are thoroughly involved in the decision-making process, along with the team of other C-suite leaders in their organization, and/or are the final decision-maker in regard to IT budgets. What do the results tell us?

For one—CIOs and IT leaders in the healthcare industry are working more collaboratively with their line-of-business leaders, and according to the CIOs that we spoke with, it is definitely beneficial for IT departments. It also tells us that with more influence on the budget, IT leaders are able to impact the organization through the use of IT tools, while better integrating those solutions into the rest of the business infrastructure.

“Being the final decision-maker, and being a part of the budget decision-making team, positively affects our IT department because it allows IT to have the input and voice needed to guide our organization from an IT perspective,” said Brian Sterud, the director of information management at Brookings Health System.

It also could potentially leave room for innovation on the IT leaders’ part—the sky’s the limit. “My role in the budget decision-making has been beneficial for IT because it really helps us get the things that we want and need, especially during the changes that are coming around the bend (meaningful use, etc.), and I am afforded the latitude to make those decisions,” said Sterud.

Richard Corovessis, chief of information technologies at Health Quality Partners, said, “I make the decisions on what is going to be valuable to us and important to the success of our organization. I am the king of the IT department so it is very positive for me to have such a large role in the IT buying process.” 

Why Enterprise Data Warehousing Is A ‘Must-Have’ For CIOs

Leveraging information to improve performance is a “must-have” core competency that all healthcare CIOs are striving for today, and enterprise data warehousing is a preferred avenue to do just that.

According to Gartner, most organizations do not have the information, processes and tools needed to make informed, responsive enterprise decisions due to underinvestment in an information infrastructure at the enterprise level.

 “In traditional companies, departments manage analytics—number-crunching functions select their own tools and train their own people. But that way, chaos lies,” wrote Thomas Davenport in his book Competing On Analytics.

For this reason, among others, it is important for healthcare CIOs, both payer and provider, to begin to strongly consider finding ways to implement an enterprise data warehouse [EDW] initiative, that is aligned with key business strategies and needs, in order to finally organize and secure their data. It provides IT leaders with the support of realtime decision-making. This is even more crucial in times like these where we are on the brink of massive changes to the healthcare industry, in which certain data requirements must be met.

Essentia Health, a hospital and clinic organization in need of an EDW, CIOs haven’t implemented one yet, but have made tremendous progress in getting the infrastructure and governance in place for the data governance components. They have the organization moving forward with the initiative.

 “The onset of the project is to get the organization to buy in that this is a strategic project [which is not going to happen overnight], and we, as an organization, had to rally around the need for enterprise data warehousing as we embark upon our ACO strategy, meaningful use etc. We had to do something different than our operational databases,” said Ken Gilles, CIO of Essentia Health.

With an enterprise level forum in place to oversee EDW prioritization and data governance, Essentia Health is on the positive path. “It’s going to provide more meaningful data than we have available today—it will provide more of the data to know what we are getting into and how we will need to function in environments such as health management entry and risk-sharing arrangements,” said Gilles.

Similar to Essentia Health’s EDW initiative, Orlando Health, one of Florida’s most comprehensive private and not-for-profit healthcare networks including community hospitals, specialized hospitals and a world-class cancer center, has an EDW in the works. It already has its EDW (Healthcare DataWorks product) platform in place with its pilot deliverable and an analytics executive governance structure being formed. It is in the process of continuing to inventory its resources: departmental BI/DSS technologies, reporting sources and supporting staff before its initial data load validation, although it has about 10 percent of it populated at this time.

Orlando Health’s CIO, Rick Schooler, was just named the CIO of the Year at HIMSS 2012 in Las Vegas this past February. He is the 23rd recipient of the award, and has worked in the healthcare industry for 21 years. In a conversation with Schooler about his EDW implementation, he said that he is primarily looking for “one source of truth” to act as a feeder to all of the different kinds of internal and external reporting services with his organization, as well as the data mining, analytics and data analysis efforts that every provider organization conducts.

“We cant keep doing the kinds of data extracting and BI in our respective silos that we are doing—it just isn’t going to work in the future of healthcare. It’s got to be integrated information that really gives the true complete picture for whatever the need. With the changes ahead, the healthcare industry is going to be a completely different world. We’ve got to get our hands around all the information, and get it into a consolidated and integrated single source of truth that can serve the entire organization,” said Schooler.

With all successful plans come some challenges, and EDW initiatives are no different. Some challenges include: key organization champions either delaying or denying to be on board with the project; departmental data ownership issues; the quality of the data; hiring knowledgeable and experienced staff; or competing projects that may take precedence. “Probably the main challenge is migrating the data to the warehouse from all of the different sources of data, whether it’s internal or external, from all of the different systems that we have,” said Gilles.

“The biggest challenge in doing EDW is getting to the point of having the kind of capability to harness all of the different source systems. Furthermore, getting that information extracted, transformed and loaded into a warehouse platform that people will see as credible, will trust and will begin to use, as compared to the point-to-point interfaces or extracts that they get in the source systems dumping into their tool of choice, which they are convinced is the truth,” said Schooler.

He also explained that there is a challenging need for the right team of experts, who know the know the data inside and out, know the EDW model and the data mining tools to make sure that it’s valid before it goes into the warehouse. Most healthcare organizations don’t have the needed skill sets sitting on their payroll, so recruiting the right people to be on this team—with the right skill set and the right kind of experience—is going to be absolutely critical to success. Orlando Health currently has 10 to 15 people on their EDW team, and is growing by the day.

So, what would be these CIOs’ advice to other healthcare CIOs out there? Get it sold, get it bought in and get the right people behind it. As soon as that happens, establish an executive level governance group, which will represent the different areas of the organization, and keep everyone in the organization up to date on where you are headed.

Top 20 iPad Medical Apps

With the recent release of the new Apple iPad and the increasing need to take their work on the go, healthcare professionals everywhere are taking advantage of all the innovative aspects that the iPad has to offer. With BYOD and the increasing need for mobility strategies and network infrastructure security, this iPad craze really means one thing: more work for the healthcare CIO.

So, once a healthcare CIO puts iPads in the hands of their payer or provider staff, the question is: What apps should they download? Below are the 20 most sought-after medical iPad applications that all medical professionals with iPads should (must) have, based on a list compiled by iMedicalApps.com, as well as the Apple App Store statistics, deeming these medical applications highest rated and most downloaded.

1.     ICD 10 Codes

2.     Blausen Human Atlas

3.     Visual DX Mobile

4.     Procedures Consultant

5.     OsiriX or eFilm

6.     My Medical

7.     MediMath Medical Calculator

8.     Pocket Medical Spanish

9.     LabGear

10. MyHealth Checklist

11. MedAbbreviations

12. Healthx

13. FOCUS Pocket Guide

14. Dropbox

15. Black Bag

16. Drugs & Medications

17. Papers

18. WebMD

19. Code Check Pro

20. Memo Medical Notebook

Medical professionals want to be able to do their jobs quicker and more efficiently and iPad applications, like those mentioned, answer their questions and access their patients’ data in ways they never thought possible. For this reason, many healthcare CIOs have been challenged with the task of distributing and/or securing iPads on their IT infrastructure.

“Members of our medical staff have said that they love using iPads applications because of the constant connectedness that iPads offer. We don’t currently give out iPads to our staff—they are put on our infrastructure through BYOD— but we plan to do so on July 1. We plan to have at least 60 percent of our staff use them clinically at the start of our next fiscal year,” said Patrick Wilson, department information security officer at Contra Costa County Health Services. Once they completely secure the data theft and other safety principals, they will move forward with their iPad distribution, as those security issues are their biggest concern, Wilson added.

Payer organizations face the same security challenges as providers when it comes to iPad use, but many CIOs in that space feel that the applications available are worth the risk. Robert Schleichert, associate vice president of information systems at AultCare, said that their iPad implementation plan is currently in the RND stage; he confirmed that iPads are the future of the healthcare payer industry.

IT vendors have noticed the significant increase in the need, and desire, for iPads in the healthcare space and are working diligently to provide the best solutions to all their infrastructure and security needs. In a conversation with Mark Hanson, director of strategic accounts for healthcare at Fortinet, he said: “I definitely think those iPad applications are absolutely worth the risks. At HIMSS 2012, Aetna, for example, got to see their chairman of the board do a presentation on mobile applications. This insurance provider is actually spending over a half a billion dollars on building and purchasing mobile applications companies for healthcare.”

The patients are more and more efficient at understanding what their ailments are; so healthcare professionals have to be able to enable their physicians to understand the latest information on specific problems their patients are facing. IT companies like Fortinet are stepping in to integrate and prevent those devices from infecting the networks and spreading that infection. “Having security-based Wi-Fi devices, like what we offer, are key requirements for healthcare CIOs today when implementing iPad application solutions,” said Hanson.