Question

You have just been hired as the chief informatics officer (CIO) for a new health system. The health system has 23 acute care facilities and 36 outpatient clinics. It serves as a regional referral center for three states in the Midwest. Your installed base includes a vendor-supplied EHR from a national firm. Work on the data warehouse is just beginning. You have more than 300 varying applications across sites, including everything from a stand-alone pharmacy application for drug interactions to a cancer registry. Your goal is to provide IT support for the organizational vision of being the premier health organization in patient safety for the region. One of the first things you want to do is to plan for the future of IT.

Discussion Questions

1. Given the future directions discussed in this chapter, select the two directions you want to emphasize. Provide rationale for your choices.

2. Discuss how you can use methodologies from futures research to plan for your preferred future with the future directions you selected in Question 1.

3. Outline steps to introduce the chief executive officer to nanotechnology and its potential impact on the organization.

4. You want to increase collaborative work with a local university. What future directions for education do you think are most important as CIO?

Answer 1

1. A. Vendor-supplied EHR from a national firm.

To emphasize vendor-supplied EHR in a national firm. The rational behind of this direction is to implement EHRs is to receive financial incentives. Healthcare providers and sites could easily experience detrimental impacts to workflow and patient care.

B. Work on data warehouse is just beginning.

Data warehouse is a central data source that combines data from various health care system. Access is controlled by authorizations maintained within the ROLES database. Only authorized users can access data based tool, export the results to other software programs and manipulate data locally.

2. A. The health care reform and the changing health care environment would require medical data to be in electronic form that could be accessed by providers, hospitals, government organization and private health care management. Thus the successful medical practitioners in the future would need to change the way in which they provide care and would be those whose practices have 'life-long EHRs that allow comprehensive medical record keeping, inclusive of patient charting, billing, coding, scheduling and fmdata reporting to third parties. Thus, the health care reform and the changing environment worldwide have definitely accelerated the implementation and the use of EHRs.

B. The data warehouse will evolve into three separate technology areas. Optimization technology will focus on determining the stability of data usage by health care. Well established, consistent and stable use-cases such as those in key performance metrics, dashboards and other results which are easily connected portals will continue to be deployed in some type of data repository.