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Wed, Oct 28 2009 5:09 PM EST
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CIOs agree: There was no new ground broken as David Blumenthal, M.D., national coordinator for health information technology, addressed the crowd. Yet, Russ Branzell said that “if you listen between the lines,” CIOs got all the direction they needed.
Branzell, the CIO at Poudre Valley Medical Center, Fort Collins, Colo., said the gist of Blumenthal’s message is all the direction a hospital needs to understand the upcoming proposed rule defining “meaningful use” is already publicly available.
“Take the last matrix and go for it,” said Joanne Sunquist, referring to the materials released by the committees advising the Office of the National Coordinator on meaningful use. Sunquist is the chair of CHIME and CIO at Hennepin County Medical Center, Minneapolis. “People really want the specifics,” she said, adding that “what’s out there is 80 to 90 percent of what it’s going to be like.”
Even with the lack of specifics, CIOs said they appreciated the effort by Blumenthal to connect. “He did a great job of putting this in context and explaining some of the history and process we’re in now,” said Mary Ann Leach, vice president and CIO, The Children’s Hospital, Denver. Her advice, like that of Sunquist and Branzell: Keep pressing ahead.
Branzell said the most important comment Blumenthal made is that the core goals for both ARRA and the HITECH Act are about technology as a means, not an end. In his comments, Blumenthal said the true mandate is to change the way medicine is practiced. Branzell interprets that to mean that health care “needs to focus on revolutionary change, not evolutionary change.”
Alden Solovy, associate publisher of H&HN, is blogging live from CHIME 2009.
