Big changes have arrived for healthcare organizations seeking to leverage investments in health information technology and meeting government mandates and incentive payment program requirements. But physician informaticists must balance these multiple concerns and still keep patient care at the forefront, about 200 physicians in health information technology were told Wednesday.
“Unsettled is the new normal,” said Dr. William Bria, president of the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems, during the keynote address to the 22nd annual Physician-Computer Connection Symposium in Ojai, Calif.
Bria, the chief medical officer for Dataskill, a data-analytics firm, posted a slide of a pie chart with the hypothetical proportion of the day-to-day concerns of chief medical information officers—meeting meaningful-use targets, dealing with vendors, communicating with medical staff members and chief information officers, and balancing budgets.
But Bria warned that CMIOs need to make sure they're not being distracted or confused about “what the real goals are.”
“We need to communicate with patients,” he said. “We need to talk with one another more than ever.”
Dr. Howard Landa, CMIO of Alameda (Calif.) Health System and AMDIS vice chairman, said in planning the speakers for this year's meeting there was a recurrent theme—data analytics.