Health IT priorities put regulations before innovation

The tension is palpable among healthcare IT pros, given how much change is happening at once in their industry. Lynn Witherspoon, chief medical information officer at Ochsner Health System in New Orleans, sums up the challenges: "Care delivery redesign and associated reimbursement changes, ongoing Meaningful Use and healthcare reform requirements, and the difficulty of developing new cultural norms will make next year a very busy one." Another respondent to our InformationWeek 2013 Healthcare IT Priorities Survey puts things more bluntly: "Most healthcare CIOs are supportive of the majority of the new functional requirements that are being forced on us. However, federal requirements are coming too many, too fast. – The rate of change is such that systems and changes are being implemented less than optimally."