The healthcare CIO has a lot more on his plate today than he did four years ago, and the work is going to keep piling up, according to nearly 200 CIOs who contributed to a new report by executive search firm SSi-Search.
More than two-thirds of CIOs who responded to the firm’s survey said their workload had increased 25 percent or more since the HITECH Act went into effect. More than 90 percent expect the complexity of the role to continue to increase over the next five years.
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
SSi-Search dubbed the CIO “healthcare’s new million dollar man” in its report, underscoring his involvement in overseeing important IT deployments and data reporting, and supporting changes to the hospital under ACOs and payment reform. Health IT firm Citius Tech (separately) put together the “CIO mindmap” above that illustrates the breadth of the position.
While the scope of work for healthcare CIOs has escalated, their compensation hasn’t necessarily kept up. More than half of the CIOs said their salaries increased 10 percent or less over the last four years.
But that’s not their primary concern. The executives surveyed and interviewed cited their top concern as having access to the resources they needed to do their job. Second on their list of challenges was strategic involvement with other executives on key projects.
“The healthcare CIO will need to be an active participant at the executive table assisting in defining and supporting new patient care models, new reimbursement models as well as supporting the numerous regulatory mandates that the industry is facing,” Capella Healthcare CIO Alan Smith told SSi-Search.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Looking ahead, CIOs said their focus would be on analytics initiatives, building the clinical skill sets of their teams and seeking greater strategic involvement in their health systems.
“We are finally getting to the point where CIOs can focus on information rather than just information technology,” Weill Cornell Medical College CIO Curtis Cole said in the report. “Obviously technology remains critical. But it is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself […] The strategic culture of IT needs to encompass ‘why,’ not just ‘how.’”
[Image credit: Citius Tech]
