Who: H. Stephen Lieber, 63
Retiring as: President and CEO of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society at the end of 2017.
Background: Lieber has led HIMSS since 2000 as the trade group navigated dramatic transformations in healthcare and IT.
Hindsight: “It's a very dramatic change in terms of the way healthcare is today than it was at the beginning of 2000,” Lieber said. Today “healthcare has moved into the 21st century and recognized the extreme value that technology brings in how information can be used.”
Challenges ahead: While the industry has made great strides with the widespread adoption of electronic health records, it has yet to achieve the ability to seamlessly move patient data from one healthcare facility to the next. “That's so critical in order for you to get the best possible treatment: A specialist needs to know the information that was collected when you were at the primary-care level.”
Customized care: In the future, “what we're really going to see is a customization of our care that is almost unfathomable,” Lieber said. The patient data collected today will “drive clinicians and the whole healthcare system toward a higher, more sophisticated level of precision about how we're treated.”
