“It’s important to have a strategic, forward-looking plan in place for IT. The role of an institutional IT organization is to identify those systems, services and capabilities that can best be performed centrally and to deliver them robustly at scale.
Faced with ever increasing expectations and what can feel like ever decreasing resources, it can be challenging to pick up your head and look past the crisis du jour. The urgent, by virtue of classical risk management, can squeeze out the important.
We are critical to the long-term success of virtually every aspect of the business, but in the fast-pace of work, many IT organizations confuse an end-of-year report delineating all of their accomplishments as satisfying their obligation for strategic planning. This can be helpful, but it can never replace a strategic plan, which is critical to telling your community where you are going and why.”
Read the full article from The Enterprisers Project at: enterprisersproject.com
Fantastic article in The Enterprisers Project, which is especially applicable to healthcare due to the tremendous change the industry is experiencing.
Market consolidation and transformation are happening in all sectors of healthcare, which greatly impacts IT:
- Hospitals are acquiring not only other hospitals but also physician practices
- Medical providers are opening accountable care practices that may function alongside still-operating, traditional fee-for-service models
- Electronic health record vendors are consolidating as the industry matures and successful vendors seek to increase their market share through acquisition
- Insurers continue to grow as a result to keep pace with large health systems
These moves pose many challenges for health IT.
As recently as five years ago, health IT departments were stuck with the reality of implementing “all-in-one” software suites with modules that worked together, yet didn’t adequately satisfy the needs of every department. This approach has handcuffed many CIOs who must work with many vendors during this time of market consolidation.
Leading organizations now recognize the value in establishing an interoperable health data foundation layer that allows a flexible approach to vendor selection. This approach ensures interoperability between systems that provides actionable insights to data and access to siloed EHR databases. A strategy that involves building IT infrastructure on interoperability means CIOs have complete confidence and flexibility to adopt and connect with any vendor. As healthcare is set to adopt modern data exchange standards in HL7 FHIR, the future API economy means that CIOs can reap the benefits of choosing the right technology for the job.
