Health IT

Retiring HIMSS boss sees continued bipartisan support for health IT

There has been a ton of progress in health IT since Steve Lieber took the reins of HIMSS in 2000, but there is so much work left to be done.

HIMSS CEO Steve Lieber

HIMSS President and CEO Steve Lieber

Last week, H. Stephen Lieber, president and CEO of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), announced that he would retire at the end of 2017. He still has a lot of work to do.

Lieber may have date for retirement circled on his calendar, but he is hardly checked out. “I have two years worth of agenda I’m trying to cram into one,” he quipped.

HIMSS has just begun the process of hiring a successor and might not name one until next summer, but Lieber did offer some advice to whoever gets the job. “Don’t try to do too much,” he said. The HIMSS CEO has roles as an educator and influencer, spokesperson for an entire industry and overseer of a $95 million business, albeit a not-for-profit organization.

It has not always been that way. Lieber will be leaving an organization and an industry that are far different from what existed when he came on board 17½ years earlier — though some of the challenges remain the same.

“Certainly, the organization is night and day from when I walked in here in 2000,” Lieber said by phone from his downtown Chicago office.

At the turn of the millennium, HIMSS was relatively small, not very influential and not regularly called on for advice by policy-makers and regulators like it is today. Now, it has about 64,000 individual, 650 corporate and 450 not-for-profit members just in North America and puts on the largest health IT event in the world, the annual HIMSS conference.

HIMSS was one of several driving forces behind the enactment of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act in 2009. Though that was ultimately rolled into the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — President Obama’s $831 billion stimulus legislation — that passed with zero Republican votes in the House and only three in the Senate, HITECH had broad, bipartisan support.

That law created the $35 billion Meaningful Use program that is largely responsible for making electronic health records ubiquitous in U.S. hospitals and the norm in office-based medical practices. Certainly, Meaningful Use has been clunky since the start of Stage 2 in 2014, but the Stage 1 goal of getting technology installed was met.

EHRs and other technological advancements have their problems, but Lieber believes they have advanced healthcare since he took the helm at HIMSS.

“We are in a better place,” both as an organization and an industry, Lieber said. “Patients are in a better place than they were 17 years ago.” But he acknowledged that there is still a lot of work to be done by qualifying his statement. “It is a somewhat safer environment” for patients, Lieber added.

When told about the recent Chicago Tribune investigation that found more than half of Illinois pharmacies randomly tested failed to catch potentially harmful drug interactions, Lieber was concerned. “That’s borderline negligence,” he said. There should be no excuse for not taking advantage of technology tools available to catch such issues, accoding to the HIMSS boss.

“We probably are still in an environment where there is too much human interaction and not enough machine activities,” Lieber said. Usability of the technology and pharmacy staffing shortages might be partially to blame, but Lieber said those are merely “excuses.”

He did note that health IT systems could stand to be improved, but said that “information blocking” and complaints about poor user interfaces are not always on the technology vendors. “The customer needs to demand products that work and work easily,” Lieber said.

Many are starting to realize that IT alone will not fix all that ails healthcare, Lieber noted. End users, particularly care providers, have come to understand that workflow is more important than the technology, Lieber said. “We really are smarter about it.”

With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, healthcare policy likely is on the cusp of another shift. Lieber believes that health IT is somewhat insulated from the volatility.

Although the American Hospital Association late last month asked the incoming Trump administration to cancel Meaningful Use Stage 3 and Trump’s healthcare team so far seems to in favor of as little regulation as possible, Lieber does not expect much to change in terms of national health IT policy in 2017. “Technology is a mostly nonpartisan issue,” he said.

From what he is hearing, the Trump team is “focused on practicality,” Lieber said, and might tweak Meaningful Use. “Some change to the regulation probably would be a good thing,” he said.

Of course, Trump has not yet gotten down to the level of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in filling out his leadership. “But I’m optimistic that there’s actually going to be a good, healthy debate about health information technology,” Lieber said

Lieber said that Rep. Tom Price (R-Georgia), Trump’s choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services, and an orthopedic surgeon, has been engaged with HIMSS in the past and has been to at least one HIMSS conference. “Our belief is that he is knowledgeable of information technology issues,” Lieber said.

Capitol Hill insiders still seem eager to learn about the industry. “We have had a very significant uptick since the election of congressional staff applying to come to the HIMSS conference,” Lieber said. The 2017 confab is set for late February in Orlando, Florida.

Photo: HIMSS

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