Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Webcast: In the Google Apps Cloud: How to Achieve Your Business Objectives
Dec 3rd, '09, 1 - 2 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Council member Brent Hoag, Director, Global IT, at JohnsonDiversey, as he discusses the adoption of Google Apps which has helped meet four corporate goals; sustainability, simplification, increased employee productivity and global collaboration.
Webcast: Collaboration Initiatives: Benchmarks & Best Practices
Dec 15th, '09, 4 - 5 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Council members Ruth Thorpe, VP & CIO at the U.S. Pharmaceutical Operations of Sanofi-Aventis, and Gary Kuyper, CIO at Bethany Christian Services, as they speak about their collaboration initiatives and experiences in how and why they chose the social networking and collaboration tools they are using and their business goals for collaboration, and facing culture change challenges.
Data Overview: Collaboration Initiatives Field Guide: Benchmarks & Best Practices
This appendix to the Council Field Guide provides an analysis which discusses benchmarks for collaboration IT implementation costs, adoption rates and payoffs. The overview identifies top IT and business goals and satisfaction rates for collaboration initiatives as well as best practices and lessons learned for implementing collaboration IT.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »February 15, 2007 — CIO —
Why would someone complete medical school and residency training, then spend a decade in IT to become a CIO? Colleagues ask me this when they hear my background. My response reflects the growing importance of integrating business professionals with information technologists.
Health care, like other fields using automation to transform business practices, requires a fusion of IT expertise and subject matter expertise. This need has given rise to multidisciplinary project teams that couple clinicians with information technologists, and to the emergence of individuals who are trained dually as clinicians and IT professionals.
During my medical training in the 1980s, I observed clinicians hampered by primitive information management tools. Information sharing among health professionals within any single hospital was suboptimal. Sharing across healthcare settings was extremely limited. Efforts to improve this situation were insufficient, with limited clinician involvement in IT.
The magnitude of the problem—and the potential benefits achievable by attacking it—captivated me. With a naive understanding of the challenge ahead and no evident career path, I decided to focus my professional life at the intersection of medicine and IT. Over the past 20 years, the most important lesson I have learned is the value of blending IT professionals with the subject matter experts they support.
During the past decade, our academic health center has created multidisciplinary teams to implement an electronic medical record (EMR). Though we are deploying commercially available products, this undertaking has proven to be ambitious for us—as it has for the entire healthcare industry. We have succeeded thus far because we have engaged clinicians to work alongside IT professionals, not just as consultants or focus group participants, but as this-is-my-job-and-passion members of the EMR team. Several clinicians have stepped away from direct patient care, driven by a desire to advance their professions and a recognition of IT’s potential to assist. A dozen nurses, pharmacists and medical laboratory professionals now devote themselves full-time to improving patient care processes, applying automation where it can help. Several physicians remain clinically active but dedicate up to 40 percent of their time to our EMR initiative.
We ensure that each project team integrates clinicians from different disciplines, since collaborative planning is required to design effective team-based care processes. Physicians, for example, know what care is required and why but often are unaware of the downstream workflows used by nursing, pharmacy, radiology and laboratories to deliver this care. Similarly, most clinicians know how they would like the computer system to work but require the expertise of the IT professionals to make it work that way. Together, and only together, does our team of clinicians and IT professionals encompass the experience and expertise required for effective process automation in health care.