Do-It-Yourself IT Solutions

“I’ve always held that it is much easier to train a clinician to understand IT than it is to train an IT person to understand the clinical world,” Wolf says. “We’re also focusing on more super-users, clinicians who don’t become IT staff but who are the on-site expert in the EMR system and can bridge that gap between the two areas of expertise.”

The pressure on healthcare IT will continue for years to come, Wolf says. Meaningful use efforts are just getting into high gear, and even after that, providers will still need an army of IT professionals.

“If meaningful use is a wave on the beach, ICD-10 is a tsunami,” Wolf says. “There is a phenomenal amount of work involved with that switch.”

This article appears in the October 2011 issue of HealthLeaders magazine.