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HIPAA Puts Innovation and the Cloud Into Perspective for Providers

I had the pleasure of attending the iHT2 conference in Atlanta for the second year in a row and was once again pleased with the opportunity to interact with providers in such an intimate setting. A far cry from the chaos and showmanship of HIMSS, to be sure. No matter what session I attended throughout the two-day event, I heard consistent mumblings of discontent around HIPAA, especially in the context of being a barrier to innovation in the mobile health space.

My Twitter friends have a habit of putting things into perspective for me, and Susana Vallelonga, aka @sgcalderoni, didn’t disappoint:

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She makes a good point – one that ties into a recent discussion I had with Frankie Rios, the new Vice President of Information Security at GNAX Health. He is facing a similar challenge when it comes to convincing providers of the benefits of the cloud in the face of new HIPAA rules. He is no stranger to challenges, though, having spent 16 years in the US Marine Corps as a Senior Network Engineer, Trainer and Supervisor. I had the chance to chat with him recently about the state of cloud computing in the wake of the recently enacted Omnibus Rule.

Do you think the newly enacted HIPAA rules will scare providers away from migrating to the cloud?
Actually, the new HIPAA rules protect providers as they migrate data and applications to the cloud. Whether it is cloud computing or cloud storage, the new rules provide a stronger framework. The technology continues to mature and as it does so, I believe we will continue to see a growing acceptance of cloud services from providers.

How are you working to combat these fears?
We are educating providers from both a technology and policy perspective. Technologically speaking, there is no reason why the cloud cannot be as (or more) secure than an on-premise solution. We are also providing information on implemented controls to secure patient data within the cloud.

You recently created a set of criteria to help providers evaluate potential cloud providers and their compliance with HIPAA requirements. How would you say this list has changed in the last five years? What should providers be aware of now that they may not have even considered a few years ago?

The list has really not changed much in the last five years. All of the controls are based on information management security best practices that have been around much longer. What has changed are the security technologies and cost of implementing the controls. For some, the costs have gone down and for some the costs have increased.

A few years ago it was difficult to ensure that vendors had the proper controls in place. There were no instruments to hold vendors accountable other than extra contract language or business associate agreements. The responsibility was on the provider to implement security controls and ensure HIPAA compliance. In the case of a breach, the provider (not the vendor) was liable.

With the new rule, business associates are also liable in the event of a breach, and must ensure that the same security controls are in place.

Along those same lines, how do maturing EMR technologies play into a provider’s decision to move to the cloud?
Most EMRs already have the ability to deliver their application in a cloud-based environment, or their solution is offered as an ASP model. This makes it very easy for providers to migrate their EMR technologies to the cloud.

The cloud is really just the “next step” from virtualization of current assets. It is not maturity of the EMR itself, but simply an enhanced infrastructure and platform functionality.

However, providers should ask how cloud options for their EMR impact clinician workflow. Changes should be clinician-centric; not technology-centric. All the technology in the world is meaningless if it doesn’t improve the workflow or functionality of the clinician.

It seems you are well versed in risk analysis, coming from a military background and then moving into healthcare IT. How has that first career prepared for you this new age of digital breaches in healthcare environments?
My first career in the military greatly improved my ability to act quickly on new situations or regulations. In addition, the emphasis on planning is an important part of the process along with communication.

Risk analysis is an ongoing process. Most implementation mistakes are around performing risk analysis and then doing nothing for the rest of the year. Risk analysis must be part of all aspects of information management in healthcare: especially, strategic and budget planning.

Simply checking the box off that the risk analysis is complete is wrong! As business processes and technology changes, so will the risks that have been introduced. Risk analysis is an ongoing process – not a once and done.

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April 25, 2013 I Written By

As Social Marketing Director at Billian, Jennifer Dennard is responsible for the continuing development and implementation of the company’s social media strategies for its three key properties – Billian’s HealthDATA, Porter Research and HITR.com. She is a regular contributor to a number of healthcare blogs, and currently manages the Technology Association of Georgia Health Society’s social media channels. You can find her on Twitter @SmyrnaGirl.

Filed Under: EHR  Electronic Health Record  Electronic Medical Record  EMR  Healthcare  Healthcare IT
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User Experience is Hot HIT Topic with Good Reason

User experience in the world of healthcare IT has never been a hotter topic. It seems not a day goes by that I don’t come across an article, blog, tweet, or outright rant regarding the state of user friendliness, especially with regard to EMRs. (Who can forget the American Medical Association’s note earlier this year to Farzad Mostashari, peppered with complaints about physician usability of EMRs?) I see plenty of negative coverage around the topic – plenty of folks like to have a soapbox to stand on, after all.

I don’t, however, see enough coverage devoted to businesses and providers working to make the backlash better. Surely there are unsung heroes out there in the world of HIT UX that are at their drawing boards right now, attempting to take the sting out of those extra clicks, and listening with bated breath to providers’ complaints and praises.

I came across one such story in New Orleans a few months ago, where, like many of you, I tried to successfully drink from the fire hose (bottled water, actually) that was HIMSS13. I was able to sate my thirst for good UX news at the PointClear Innovation Awards breakfast, which honored a select group of the company’s clients for their work in the realm of user experience.

McKesson took home top honors this year, and while I had some knowledge of their work in the area, I didn’t realize how great of an emphasis they have placed on making sure their healthcare IT solutions are used in the most optimal way for the best possible patient outcomes.

“The big dynamic we are trying to tackle is around critical decision makers,” explains Bobby Middleton, Executive Director, Enterprise Intelligence Product Management at McKesson. “Through experience with our customers and continued research, it is becoming very obvious that our healthcare leaders are often put in a position to make critical decisions without pertinent, relevant and timely information.

“Our Enterprise Intelligence solutions are all geared around providing the right information to the right person at the right time,” he adds. “Our User Experience research is being used to make sure the targeted offering we are delivering via these solutions help a specific set of critical decision makers make the right decision. It is going great so far, and really allowing our technology teams to connect with their end consumers.”

I wonder if we’ll start to see more positive publicity of efforts like McKesson’s, especially as Stage 2 draws closer, more and more providers consider switching to more mature EMRs, and next year’s predicted influx of the newly insured start to clamor for greater digital engagement options and price transparency. One less click or toggle may just make all the difference when it comes to quality patient care.

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April 18, 2013 I Written By

As Social Marketing Director at Billian, Jennifer Dennard is responsible for the continuing development and implementation of the company’s social media strategies for its three key properties – Billian’s HealthDATA, Porter Research and HITR.com. She is a regular contributor to a number of healthcare blogs, and currently manages the Technology Association of Georgia Health Society’s social media channels. You can find her on Twitter @SmyrnaGirl.

Filed Under: EMR  Healthcare  Healthcare IT  Meaningful Use
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Meaningful Use, HIMSS, and mHealth Updates – Around Healthcare Scene

Meaningful Use standards prove to be a headache time and time again. For small hospitals, doing their best to implement an EHR and then meet standards may not be enough. And the consequences can be dire — they may not receive their incentive money, and are left worse off than before they purchased the EHR.

And with the recent sequestration, will Meaningful Use incentives be slashed? An editorial by Tom Sullivan discusses the possibility, and talks with Scott Lundstrom, group vice president of consultancy at IDC’s Health Insight Unit. Lundstrom suggests some reason to worry. Anne Zieger analyzes the editorial and chimes in her thoughts about how health IT may have something to worry about soon.

Because HIMSS 13 just finished, there were a few posts about some of the information from the conference here at Healthcare Scene. Mandi Bishop attended and gives an overview of her experience over at EMR and HIPAA. She compares it to the Wizard of Oz, and discovering that the main behind the curtain is simply that.

At another conference, SXSW, John was able to meetup with one of his hospital colleagues, and showed that you may run into anyone at a conference. They can be great networking opportunities, and being able to meet with others allows you to find out about different products and services.

In the smartphone and tablet world, here’s an app you’ll want to download. One way to be healthier is limiting one’s sodium intake. The Mayo Clinic  revealed that while the average person should not have more than 2,300 mg of sodium a day, most Americans get around 3,400 mg. Sodium 101 was created to help people make smarter choices, and understand the amount of sodium they are getting each day. Excess sodium can lead to weight loss and a host of other problems, including many auto immune diseases, so this is an important topic.

On the subject of weight loss, a recent study has found that financial incentives inspire weight loss. The participants in the incentive groups were given a sum of money for meeting their health goals, but also were required to pay a certain sum to a pool that participants were entered to win in the end.

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March 17, 2013 I Written By

Katie Clark is originally from Colorado and currently lives in Utah with her husband and son. She writes primarily for Smart Phone Health Care, but contributes to several Health Care Scene blogs, including EMR Thoughts, EMR and EHR, and EMR and HIPAA. She enjoys learning about Health IT and mHealth, and finding ways to improve her own health along the way.

Filed Under: EHR  Electronic Health Record  Electronic Medical Record  EMR  Healthcare  Healthcare IT
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Women Unite at HIMSS13

I’ll admit it. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when Julie Moffitt, the original #HITchick herself, asked me to host the first #HITchicks tweetup, at HIMSS13. What I envisioned as four or five gals gathering at a bar near the convention center turned into something so much more rewarding. Twenty-plus women (and two of the smartest men in healthcare IT) showed up and jumped right into a dialogue around the challenges of what it means to be a woman in healthcare.

You might think this topic a tired one, but it is still incredibly relevant, especially as women like Yahoo’s Melissa Mayer and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg put a new and divisive spin on what it takes to be successful women in tech.

The role of women in healthcare was also touched upon. When it comes to health – be it family or business – women definitely seem to be in the driver’s seat. Many in the audience noted that women make up a fair chunk of their C-suite – an ironic statement considering the off-putting presence of several scantily clad booth babes a few halls over. We’ve come so far, yet still have a ways to go.

I’m looking forward to gathering another fantastic group together at HIMSS next year, if not before then. In the meantime, take a look at a few of the tweets and pictures captured at HIMSS13:

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chickstweet1

bradmandi

Mandi Bishop, Principal at Adaptive Product Solutions, and Brad Justus, ICD-10 Whisperer at KForce. Justus was joined by a second honorary #HITchick, Mark Palacio, Senior Manager, Media Relations – Healthcare IT at Siemens Healthcare.

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March 14, 2013 I Written By

As Social Marketing Director at Billian, Jennifer Dennard is responsible for the continuing development and implementation of the company’s social media strategies for its three key properties – Billian’s HealthDATA, Porter Research and HITR.com. She is a regular contributor to a number of healthcare blogs, and currently manages the Technology Association of Georgia Health Society’s social media channels. You can find her on Twitter @SmyrnaGirl.

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“If You Could Tell Your CIO …”

In the first part of this blog series, I outlined the increasingly important role CMIOs are playing in the hospital ecosystem. They are bridging the gap between the world of clinical and IT, bringing a spirit of impartiality to HIT implementations that often makes the acceptance of impending workflow upsets a little bit easier to swallow.

This second part will focus on the specific challenges CMIO panelists at a recent Georgia HIMSS luncheon were particularly vocal about:

* Taking an EMR implementation from grumbles to growth;
* Data and its potential impact on establishing or refining best practices;
* Patient engagement; and
* “If You Could Tell a CIO.”

From Grumbles to Growth
All the panelists shared their “secret ingredients” for EMR implementation success. Roland Matthews, MD, physician champion at Grady, stressed that the hospital chose to implement an EMR not for the Meaningful Use incentives, but to ultimately improve quality over the long term. Despite recent EMR backlash, Matthews is a firm believer in the benefit they will ultimately bring to patient care.

That being said, he believes that simpler, easier-to-use systems are the best choice when it comes to gaining full adoption amongst clinicians. His statement echoes the increasingly loud call from clinicians for better user experience. Involving all departments in the selection and implementation process from the very beginning is also essential, according to Matthews, and serves as a testament to good leadership.

The best user experience won’t take physicians very far, however, if infrastructure is too unreliable to sport it. While he didn’t claim to speak from personal experience, Matthews also pointed out the latest and greatest EMR may never be used to its fullest potential if the platform on which it stands is down half the time.

Steve Luxenberg, MD, CMIO at Piedmont Healthcare, made sure to point out the full value of an EMR can only be realized if clinical and IT work together to maintain, optimize, and grow the product from within.

This takes us to conversation points about extracting data to create or refine best practices in an effort to drive quality initiatives.

Digging Out Data to Increase Quality
“It’s not an EMR for the sake of an EMR,” Luxenberg emphasized. “It’s about the data we can pull out, interpret and impact outcomes with.”

Daniel Wu, part-time CMIO at Grady, echoed Luxenberg’s comments: “The EMR has opened a door to allow us to collect data as we’ve never been able to do before.” The panelists all agreed on this point, and now it seems as if they are tackling the issue of interpreting the data to enable better outcomes and quality.

Matthews insisted that collecting the data is really all about quality, and suggested that the EMR should guide standards, which the panelists referred to in the same context as best practices.

Wu made the point that if providers don’t control what designates quality care, or best practices, then the government will come along and regulate it for them. (I’m fairly certain this echoes what Farzad Mostashari has tweeted about in the recent past.)

Luxenberg again emphasized the impartiality CMIOs must take when dealing with clinical and IT staff. He noted the CMIO’s role is to bring the two groups together for consensus on what best practices are and how to put those into the EMR, and added this becomes more challenging when working in a multi-facility healthcare system.

Patient Engagement
Patient portals were on the tips of all the panelists’ tongues when it came to patient engagement. Julie Hollberg, MD, CMIO at Emory, is in the middle of rolling out a portal right now. Her team is finding the most challenging part of that implementation to be educating Emory patients on what benefits the portal offers. Luxenberg was a bit lukewarm with regard to patient portals. He’s seen several come and go and has found that only a certain set of patients is apt to use them.

Wu, who has helped implement Epic’s MyChart at Grady, was firm when he said that patients have the responsibility in their court now. Patient kiosks are helping in that effort, too.

What Would You Like Your CIO to Know?
Wu’s big point was that if CMIOs and CIOs can’t communicate, each is doomed to fail. He said it with a smile, of course, as his CIO, moderator Debbie Cancilla from Grady, was standing right next to him.

Other insights included:

* Keep IT simple for the clinicians.
* Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should.
* Always keep in mind what’s best for the patient, and what’s the simplest way to get that done.
* It’s always a good idea to have IT folks shadow clinicians and vice versa. The CMIO’s job is to help facilitate this type of partnership.

How have CMIOs brought your clinical and IT teams together? Please share anecdotes and more best practices in the comments below.

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March 7, 2013 I Written By

As Social Marketing Director at Billian, Jennifer Dennard is responsible for the continuing development and implementation of the company’s social media strategies for its three key properties – Billian’s HealthDATA, Porter Research and HITR.com. She is a regular contributor to a number of healthcare blogs, and currently manages the Technology Association of Georgia Health Society’s social media channels. You can find her on Twitter @SmyrnaGirl.

Filed Under: EMR  EMR Adoption  Healthcare  Healthcare IT  Meaningful Use
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Improving the EHR Interface and Topol Saves Patient’s Life on Flight Home

As I thought through my day at HIMSS, a theme started to emerge from all the dozens of meetings I’ve already had at the show (with many more still to come). The theme I saw coming out was ways to improve the EHR interface. This is a much needed change in EHR’s, so it was interesting to see a whole series of companies working on ways to make the EHR interface better. Here are some of the highlights from companies I talked to at HIMSS.

SwiftKey – While the SwiftKey product can be used in the consumer space as well, it was interesting to see the technology applied to healthcare. SwiftKey is basically a replacement for your mobile device keyboard. In fact, I’d call SwiftKey a smart keyboard for your mobile device. What does it do to make your mobile device keyboard smart?

First, it offers word suggestions you can easily choose as you start to type. Most people are familiar with this base functionality because it exists in some form in most mobile keyboards (or at least it does on my Android). However, they’ve taken it a couple steps further. They actually use the context of what you’ve typed to predict what word you may want to type next. For example, if you type, “nausea and” then it predicts that you’ll want to type vomiting. If you type “urinary” then it will predict tract and then infection. Plus, they told me their algorithm will also learn your own colloquial habits. Kind of reminds me of Dragon voice recognition that learns your voice over time. SwiftKey learns your language habits over time.

I’m sure some of these predictive suggestions could lead to some hilarious ones, but it’s an interesting next step in the virtual keyboards we have on mobile devices. I’ll be interested to hear from doctors about what they think of the SwiftKey keyboard when it’s integrated with the various EHR iPad apps.

M*Modal and Intermountain – Thinking back on the demos and products I’ve seen at HIMSS 2013, I think that the app M*Modal has created for Intermountain might be the coolest I’ve seen so far. In this app, a doctor would say an order for a prescription, and the M*Modal technology would apply voice recognition and then parse the words into the appropriate CPOE order fields. It was pretty impressive to see it in action. Plus, the time difference between speaking the order and trying to manually select the various order fields on the mobile device was incredible.

I was a little disappointed it was only a demo system, but it sounds like Intermountain is still doing some work on their end to make the CPOE happen. I’m also quite interested to see if a simple mobile app like this will see broad adoption or if more features will need to be added to get the wide adoption. However, it was almost like magic to see it take a recorded voice and convert it into 5-7 fields on the screen. I’d be interested to see the accuracy of the implementation across a large set of doctors, but the possibilities are quite interesting for transforming the CPOE interface.

Cerner Mobile – One of the new Cerner ambulatory EHR features is an iPad interface for the doctor. I’m sure that many will think this is old news since so many other iPad EHR interfaces are out there. In some ways it is, but there was a slickness to their app that I hadn’t seen a lot of places. In fact, the demo of their ambulatory EHR iPad app reminded me a lot of the features that I saw in this video Jonathan Dreyer from Nuance created (bottom video) that demonstrated some of the mobile voice capabilities. Plus, the app had a nice workflow and some crazy simple features like doing a refill. One swipe and the med was refilled. Almost makes it too easy.

Canon – This is a little different than some of the other EHR interface things I talk about above. In the case of Canon it was interesting to see the tight integration that’s possible between the Canon scanners and EHR software. Instead of the often laborious process of scanning to your EHR and assigning it to a patient, Canon has a scan direct to EMR option including analyzing the cover sheet to have the scanned document attached to the right patient and EHR chart location. While we’d all love to have paper gone, it will be a part of healthcare for the forseeable future. The scan direct to EMR is a pretty awesome feature.

Those are a number of the EHR interface things that I’ve seen so far at HIMSS. I’m sure there are dozens of others out there as well. I think this is a great trend. Sure, each of these things is only a small incremental change, but with hundreds of EHR vendors all doing small incremental changes we’re going to see great things. That’s good, because many of the current EHR interfaces are terribly unusable.

In an related topic, Eric Topol gave a keynote address at HIMSS today. He had glowing reviews from what I could tell. Although, what’s an even more powerful story is to see the message he shared at HIMSS in action. On Topol’s flight home to San Diego a patient was having some medical issue. He did the ECG right on the plane using his smartphone and the passenger was able to make it safely to the destination. You can read the full story here. What’s even more amazing is that this is the second time something like this has happened to Topol. This probably means he flies too much, but also is an incredible illustration of the mHealth technology at work. Truly amazing!

Full Disclosure: Cerner and Canon are advertisers on this site.

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March 5, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 5000 articles with John having written over 2000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 9.3 million times. John also recently launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit.

Filed Under: EHR  Electronic Health Record  Electronic Medical Record  EMR  Healthcare  Healthcare IT
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Being Moral and Right, ACOs, and Medical Bills: #HITsm Chat Highlights

Topic One: Will 2013 by the “Year Of The Great #EHR Switch” as predicted by Black Book Rankings. Why or Why not?

Topic Two: @Farzad_ONC told #healthIT vendors they must do what is “moral and right” or face consequences.” What acts cross the line?

Topic Three: A recent WSJ article said “#ACOs hold caregivers accountable without requiring patient accountability.” Do you agree?

Topic Four: What are your thoughts on the recent Time magazine article Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us?

Topic Five: #HIMSS13 Free-For-All. What are your key sessions, conference suggestions and restaurant recommendations?

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March 2, 2013 I Written By

Katie Clark is originally from Colorado and currently lives in Utah with her husband and son. She writes primarily for Smart Phone Health Care, but contributes to several Health Care Scene blogs, including EMR Thoughts, EMR and EHR, and EMR and HIPAA. She enjoys learning about Health IT and mHealth, and finding ways to improve her own health along the way.

Filed Under: EHR  EHR Market  Electronic Health Record  Electronic Medical Record  EMR  Healthcare IT
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HIMSS13 Healthcare IT Preview Video with HIMSS Execs

I decided to try out the new Google+ hangout option to record a video interview with a number of HIMSS Executives to talk about the upcoming HIMSS 2013 conference in New Orleans. The technology worked out pretty well and we had a really interesting discussion about HIMSS and many other healthcare IT topics. Check out the video interview embedded below.

Here’s the list of people who took part in the interview:
Rod Piechowski, HIMSS Senior Director, Health Information Systems
Mary P. Griskewicz, MS, FHIMSS, Senior Director, Health Information Systems
David Collins, Senior Director, mHIMSS

Next time I’m hoping to do the G+ Hangout live so you can participate in the event as well. In fact, I’ve already started discussions with a number of top healthcare IT people about doing more G+ hangouts. So, watch for more interviews like this in the future.

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March 1, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 5000 articles with John having written over 2000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 9.3 million times. John also recently launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit.

Filed Under: Healthcare  Healthcare IT  mHealth
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CMIOs Bridge the Clinical & IT Gap

It’s been interesting to see the evolution of conversation around healthcare IT at the provider-focused events I’ve attended over the last two years. Panels of hospital executives at first spoke about the benefits they were likely to see as a result of the HITECH Act and their facilities’ subsequent plans for EMR implementation. One-year later, it was all about best practices for go lives. Today, conversation has reached the “now what?” phase.

This was definitely top of panelists’ minds at the recent Georgia HIMSS Lunch & Learn, which offered attendees a hearty Italian meal and the chance to hear area CMIOs converse around the topic of “CMIO 2.0 – Leading Healthcare Transformation.” While “transformation” tends to be a bit overused, I think it was an apt word based on the remarks from moderator Debbie Cancilla, Senior VP and CIO at Grady Health System; Julie Hollberg, MD, CMIO at Emory Healthcare; Daniel Wu, part-time CMIO at Grady; Roland Matthews, MD, physician champion at Grady; and Steve Luxenberg, MD, CMIO at Piedmont Healthcare.

I hate to play favorites, but Wu was my favorite panelist. Calling himself the “least tech savvy CMIO in the country,” he was engaging and a good sport when it came to verbal sparring with his Grady colleague, Cancilla. No one in the audience was fooled by his self-deprecation, of course. Wu, who is also Assistant Medical Director at Grady’s Emergency Care Center, and Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Emory University’s School of Medicine, knows a thing or two about healthcare IT, having put in an EMR for Grady’s emergency department. He continues to serve as a physician champion for the hospital.

Several telling themes emerged from panelists’ comments and audience questions, which I’ll share in part 1 of this post. I’ll cover challenges specific to each panelist and their facility next week in part 2.

gahimssCMIOpanel

Left to right: Julie Hollberg, MD, CMIO, Emory Healthcare; Roland Matthews, MD, Physician Champion, Grady Health System; Steve Luxenberg, MD, CMIO, Piedmont Healthcare; Daniel Wu, part-time CMIO, Grady; and Debbie Cancilla, CIO, Grady. Photo courtesy of Georgia HIMSS

Shining a Light on CMIOs
This was the first all-CMIO panel I’d ever seen, which may be indicative of their general reluctance to be put in the spotlight, and perhaps the increasingly important role they play in HIT implementations of all kinds. (I also wonder if the title of CMIO is growing. If anyone has statistics on that, please share.) Cancilla noted it was time for CMIOs to get in the healthcare transformation conversation, and while these four seemed at no loss for stories to tell and pain points to share.

CMIOs Don’t Play Favorites
When it comes to the clinical side of the house versus the IT side of the house, the panelists agreed that sometimes the two just don’t understand each other. And that’s where the CMIO steps in, acting as interpreter, smoother of ruffled feathers, and occasionally spokesperson for both departments to the higher ups. In describing his role, Luxenberg described himself as an objective third party, coming in to finesse sticky situations between clinical and IT staff. I got the impression from him that CMIOs often have more success in resolving disputes because they don’t have allegiance to one particular department, but rather the hospital as a whole.

(Sidenote: Wu mentioned a hilarious cartoon by Atlanta-based anesthesiologist Michelle Au that highlights the delicate verbal dance CMIOs must do when talking with various medical specialties. Check out “The 12 Medical Specialty Stereotypes.” It’s worth noting Wu would be considered a “cowboy.”)

Getting it Done for the Patient’s Benefit
Because they represent the interests of the hospital, these CMIOs ultimately hold themselves accountable to the patient, and benefiting the patient is a big part of the message they have to convey to clinical and IT folks, especially during times of implementation. Luxenberg noted that he gets better EMR buy in from different departments when he highlights the benefits to patient care, rather than focusing on details specific to one department in particular.

Talking with different departments does mean, however, that CMIOs must step out of their comfort zones and really get familiar with the pressures of each area within their facility. Conveying this information is where a great relationship with the CIO comes in. For the CMIO’s objectivity to truly be valuable, that assessment must be meaningfully discussed with the CIO. As Cancilla mentioned, CIOs need to step up and strengthen relationships with their CMIOs. All the panelists and Cancilla agreed the communication from the top down and bottom up is key to successful adoption of healthcare IT.

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February 27, 2013 I Written By

As Social Marketing Director at Billian, Jennifer Dennard is responsible for the continuing development and implementation of the company’s social media strategies for its three key properties – Billian’s HealthDATA, Porter Research and HITR.com. She is a regular contributor to a number of healthcare blogs, and currently manages the Technology Association of Georgia Health Society’s social media channels. You can find her on Twitter @SmyrnaGirl.

Filed Under: Electronic Medical Record  EMR  EMR Adoption  Healthcare  Healthcare IT
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Free Food, Free Drink, and Great Peeps – New Media Meetup at #HIMSS13

For those of you who only read EMR and EHR and don’t read EMR and HIPAA (you should really read both and consider subscribing to the EMR and HIPAA email list), I wanted to make sure you knew about the New Media Meetup at HIMSS 2013 (plus we have the details on the food). This is the fourth year for the event and I believe this will be the biggest and best one yet.

A big thanks to docBeat Secure Messaging for sponsoring the event so we can provide free food and drinks to everyone who attends. If you participate in new media at HIMSS, then we’d love to have you Register Here and come meet many other great healthcare social media people.

Now for the details:
When: Tuesday 3/5 6:00-8:00 PM
Where: Mulate’s Party Hall – 743 Convention Center Boulevard, New Orleans, LA MAP
Who: Anyone who uses or is interested in New Media (Blogs, Twitter, Social Media, etc)
What: Food, Drinks, and Amazing People

Be sure to Register Here if you plan to attend.

Along with an open bar, we’ve also just finalized the menu for the event:
Veggie, Fruit and Cheese Tray
Mini French Muffalettas
Bit size Catfish and/or Tilapia
Fried or Grilled Chicken Tenders
Meatballs

About Our Sponsor
docBeat Secure Text Messaging Logo
docBeat® allows physicians and other healthcare professionals to seamlessly communicate with one another using their mobile phone or web browser while ensuring HIPAA compliance and avoiding liability issues. Plus, there’s no more dealing with the hassle of being on hold to find out who is on call or busy. docBeat® allows physicians to provide a docBeat phone number to be reached at while keeping their actual phone number private. For more information visit www.docbeat.co.

A big thanks also goes out to Erin and Beth from The Friedman Marketing Group for helping us locate a great venue in New Orleans and helping us plan the event. They are class acts and I always love working with them and their PR company.

Finally, thanks as always to all the members of Influential Networks and Healthcare Scene that help us promote the New Media Meetup. We’ve hada record number of signups already. We look forward to seeing everyone at the event.

Let me know if you have any other questions about the event.

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February 19, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 5000 articles with John having written over 2000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 9.3 million times. John also recently launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit.

Filed Under: Healthcare  Healthcare IT  Healthcare Social Media
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