Skip to main content

How CIOs Cope When the Going Gets Tough

 |  By eprewitt@healthleadersmedia.com  
   January 03, 2012

Healthcare IT is subordinate to the medical mission. Information technology in hospitals and healthcare systems operates in the service of executives, medical staff, and especially patients, and healthcare CIOs tend to focus on industry-specific issues such as meaningful use, healthcare information exchanges, and EMRs/EHRs/PHRs. The professional organizations for healthcare CIOs, CHIME and HIMSS, speak to the specific issues of their members.

Yet I am struck by how similar the healthcare CIO's job is becoming to that of CIOs across other industries. John Halamka, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School and a noted blogger, recently penned a column titled "The modern healthcare CIO job: It's becoming a Mission Impossible." He recounts a host of difficulties, including "compliance burdens, overwhelming demands, and impossible expectations."

These issues are common to many CIOs, no matter what industry they work in. Though IT executives in healthcare may face more than their share of regulatory compliance requirements, the CIO is often the default chief compliance officer. A bigger concern is the gap between the expectations of IT and the CIO's ability to deliver.

It may help or just depress you to know that this gap is endemic and is hardly limited to healthcare.

The disparity between expectations of IT and reality results, paradoxically, from the success of technology. People have come to expect instant communication and copious data from their devices. In an age of Internet protocol, it's hard to explain why systems can't talk to one another. (Legacy systems are meaningless to those who haven't invested money in buying them or training time in using them.)

To people used to downloading new, ever-more-inventive apps, it's hard to explain why IT systems can't accomplish seemingly simple tasks. Reliability and privacy are always someone else's problem?i.e., yours.

If there is some solace, it may be that other CIOs have foundered on these rocks before you, and have come back with a handful of strategies for coping:

Focus on the foundation. Many CIOs have observed that balky email systems and network downtime do more to undermine the credibility of IT than just about anything else, no matter how mundane you might consider them. Real-time dashboards now allow you to be transparent about IT services delivery. Of course, transparency also means accountability.

Manage expectations. Of course your users want everything yesterday, and they want it free. Wouldn't you? CIOs across many industries have adopted various approaches to improve contact?business analysts, IT governance meetings, and IT marketing campaigns, to name a few.

But successful measures generally boil down to communicating what is realistic versus what would require a new infrastructure, to understanding what people really need to do, and to saying "yes, but" rather than no.

Gain a seat at the table. This phrase, along with the word "alignment," is sometimes used wistfully to envision a nirvana where the CIO is consulted on all important business decisions, and IT and its business-side partners march in lockstep. In reality, a seat at the executive table is usually hard-won and requires constant work to prove the value of IT.

Even without such a seat, you can work to show that you're a willing partner with business departments, physicians, and partners to enable them to do what they should be doing.

Agile management. Not agile IT, necessarily. Your IT department must be able to respond quickly to crises, new demands, and new technologies.

What's missing from this list? Technology?which is simply the means to the ends that your organization seeks. Although it helps to understand technology, if only to know when a vendor is trying to snow you, in the end, the job of healthcare technology leaders is to help lead the organization. That's a job they share with all CIOs.

 

Edward Prewitt is the Editorial Director of HealthLeaders Media.
Twitter

Tagged Under:


Get the latest on healthcare leadership in your inbox.