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.
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.
ACO Model A Major Tech Challenge For Payer CIOs, Says Study
While many healthcare payer organizations plan to participate in the new healthcare business models, specifically Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), most do not have the technology in place to reach this goal.
According to a recent HealthEdge Payer Market study, 55 percent of the executives surveyed said that they plan to implement ACOs within the next three years. However, 63 percent of those participants also said that they currently do not have the necessary technology to support those changes. HealthEdge surveyed more than 100 IT executives.
“We’ve got this very interesting industry situation where many of the payer organizations out there are quickly realizing that they must participate in the new healthcare business models if they are truly going to compete in the new economy. But at the same time, when the majority of those organizations are looking closer at what it takes to accomplish those goals, they are coming to a different reality,” said Raymond M. Desrochers, the executive vice president of sales and marketing at HealthEdge.
According to Healthcare IT News, there are six technology components that are essential for the successful operation of an ACO at a high level. These technology components are: role-based security, clinical data exchange, data aggregation, performance management, reporting infrastructure and financial infrastructure.
Payer organizations that plan to implement the new business models are going to have to adopt these next-generation technologies in order to move with the changing times in the healthcare industry, whether they like it or not, or whether they are prepared to or not. And, based on the survey data, more than two-thirds of the survey participants stated that their infrastructures are not ready, technologically. This is great news for vendors, like HealthEdge, who are ready and willing to provide those technology solutions.
“The one-size-fits-all healthcare offerings of yesterday are being rapidly replaced by options that support new levels of individualization, personalization and customization, and new levels of risk-sharing between payers, providers and members,” said HealthEdge CEO Rob Gillette. “Given this reality, it is not surprising that the survey respondents clearly indicated the need for modern technology platforms that will enable them to successfully compete in the emerging healthcare economy. We look forward to continuing to play a major role in the market’s technology transformation.”
The market’s transformation is a bright opportunity for all vendors in the healthcare IT space, especially for ACO solutions, as it was voted the No. 1 business model to be adopted by the participants over the course of the next three years. Healthcare CIOs need to take some time to begin thinking about their plans for the future and what technology solutions they will need to realize their ambitions. The times are changing—CIOs can either change with them or fall behind the pack.
Healthcare IT Innovation Award Winners
A prestigious group of CIOs attending this year’s Healthcare IT Summit crowned the year’s top technology suppliers during a gala event that featured hundreds of IT executives, technology suppliers and leading analysts.
The CIOs who attended the Healthcare IT Summit in Palm Springs, Calif., listened with great interest to discussions from their peers, analysts and vendor partners on the topics that occupy their waking, working (and nonworking!) hours. They’ve gained new insights into the trends that will impact what new capabilities they’ll need to bring to their payer and provider organizations. As the healthcare industry experiences massive change and transformation in the near future, these CIOs will need to implement some new strategies.
The Healthcare Innovation Awards are prized by vendors attending the Healthcare IT Summit because today’s leading IT executives, who are invited to the event to participate in a review of each supplier’s technology and business value, vote on them. More than 125 CIOs from today’s leading hospital, doctor networks, and payer and insurance companies attended the event representing several billion dollars in IT buying power.
These CIOs have paid close attention to dozens of vendors who have tried to demonstrate to them the value of their products and services. After paying close attention to these value propositions and weighing all aspects of the presentations, these executives were asked to vote on the following 10 categories: Best Technology Solution-Insurer; Best Technology Solution-Provider; Best Case Study Presentation-Insurer; Best Case Study Presentation-Provider; Best Demonstration of Value/ROI-Insurer; Best Demonstration of Value/ROI-Provider; Best Emerging Vendor-Insurer; Best Emerging Vendor-Provider; and the sought-after Best of Show award for both insurers and providers. The Innovation Awards were voted on solely by the attending IT decision-makers, who directly influence their companies’ and their peers’ technology-buying decisions.
Among the event’s big winners were Good Technology and NPI, which captured top honors for Best of Show in the provider and payer categories. The awards were split between vendors who service hospitals and medical clinics, and those who focus on the payer or insurance organizations.
Dell Storage was selected as the Best Technology Solution-Provider as well as Best Case Study Presentation-Provider. Provider CIO attendees in the audience raved over the phenomenal presentations that Dell Storage gave throughout the event, so it was no wonder that it won the innovation award for Best Case Study Presentation for providers. Dell Storage does just as its name suggests—it stores your digital data. Its award-winning EqualLogic, PowerVault and Compellent storage options were quite the buzz among attendees.
F5 won Best Case Study Presentation-Insurer. Like Dell Storage, F5 gave some outstanding case study presentations throughout the event. Insurer CIO Attendees leaving their boardroom sessions after F5’s presentation were gossiping about F5’s solutions. “F5 helps organizations create an agile IT infrastructure that aligns with their business demands,” according to the company Web site.
El Dorado was selected as Best Demonstration of Value/ROI-Insurer. During the quick-fire presentations, El Dorado’s CEO, Tom Castleberry, rocked the stage with some great information about the company’s value and ROI. El Dorado, which is part of HP, is a health-benefits-management solutions company that caters to the payer community. Its legacy product is HealthPack, which services 75 customers; its flagship product is Havalina, which was recently announced in 2009.
Fortinet was selected as Best Emerging Vendor-Insurer. Fortinet is growing into a substantial emerging vendor for the insurer community. In reference to its quick-fire presentation given by Kevin Flynn, senior manager, product marketing, its solutions prepare healthcare insurer organizations for the future during these changing time in the industry. According to the company Web site, “Fortinet appliances and virtual appliances provide your health services network with scalable, comprehensive privacy protection for patient records and other sensitive information without degrading performance of critical applications, network availability or uptime.”
Sensage was selected as Best Emerging Vendor-Provider. Sensage is another emerging vendor, on the provider side, which has made a great impression on the attending IT leaders. Sensage helps organizations with security information and event management by offering real-time event management and historical analysis. Its IT teams collect, store, correlate and analyze event data to make your information secure and safe.
Good Technology was selected as the Best Technology Solution-Insurer as well as the Best In Show-Insurer. Good Technology has caught the attention of healthcare CIOs on the Insurer side of the industry and continues to make its mark. Winning both the Best Technology Solution and the coveted Best in Show awards has put Good Technology strongly on the map. As the healthcare industry continues to become more mobile, Good Technology offers complete mobile productivity and management solutions to enable users to access e-mail, calendars and contacts wherever their job takes them.
Finally, NPI was selected as Best Demonstration of Value/ROI-Provider and Best In Show-Provider. NPI’s presentations throughout the event were a big hit. Attendees share their opinions of how NPI can really help their organization. NPI takes a very specific approach to the healthcare IT provider market by focusing on the financial, and IT budgeting and spending aspects of organizations. It advises organizations on standardized cost control and implements more efficient IT spending plans. Especially in today’s economy, this type of solution is coveted by CIOs in all industries, so it is no surprise that attendees acknowledged and rewarded NPI for being on-point to their needs.
“The Best in Show award was a huge honor for NPI, especially given the caliber of executives we met during the conference and the pressure they’re under to make their organizations compliant and competitive, “ said John Winsett, CEO, NPI. “We were able to demonstrate that with the right vendor, intelligence and insight, they can achieve this goal while spending less and securing more favorable contract terms. It’s a welcome proof-point for those executives—and I think our award reflects that.”
IT executives in the healthcare space are an opinionated group whose judgments carry much weight in the industry. And with the Healthcare Innovation Awards, they get to make known their opinions of the vendors that should be honored for outstanding performance. It’s their opportunity to say who stands out for exceptional products, programs and technologies; it’s their chance to say who dazzled them the most.
They cast their votes for the vendors whose solutions they think can be counted on as important assets to any healthcare payer or provider team. Given the robustness of the healthcare IT market, especially during this critical time in the industry, it’s no wonder that the Healthcare Innovation Awards are so coveted by today’s leading vendors.
The awards were presented at a gala dinner at the Healthcare IT Summit, which brought together over 100 senior IT leaders, the analyst community, press and both leading and emerging technology vendors.
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