By: Eric Egnet, CIO
Camp Concerned or the “CCs”
Camp Concerned is an overnight, all summer long camp…these campers need to completely adjust their living situations because what they have in place just isn’t working.
Hospital CIOs in the third camp have reason for concern. They know they will have to replace their inpatient system or upgrade to the latest vendor version. Their current system capabilities are insufficient, and/or the amount of time and money it would take to make it HITECH compliant is just not practical. They also don’t have a common ambulatory system for their physicians, so there is a knowledge that they will need to make a decision about that. Add to this, the significant amount of work and investment dollars required to enhance their IT infrastructure to support these new systems: the costs and timeframes are really starting to add up.
Most of the CCs have also had to downsize their staff this past year due to the current economy and there aren’t the internal resources to take on and execute these important initiatives. Outside help is needed to both manage and staff augment these projects and they are concerned about finding the right resources when they need them.
Funding for this Hospital CIO is a real problem. The capital that will be required to get the hospital from where it is today to where it needs to be is significant. The Hospital Board is concerned about the mounting costs and their ability to raise enough capital in this tight market. In fact, some are concluding that the costs just may be too great, and that they may need to sacrifice the HITECH incentives and deal with the penalties, to keep the hospital’s financial health in order. Sometimes strategy is what you don’t do.
Meanwhile, CCs are trying hard to find the most efficient and cost effective way they can accomplish the task at hand. There are deep discussions with their inpatient system vendor to identify creative ways to upgrade, while containing costs and spread them over time. On the ambulatory side, they are considering inexpensive ambulatory solutions that offer just enough to meet compliance requirements. Alternatively, some of these Hospital CIO’s are looking at license free open source EMR offerings that might fill the bill such as OpenEMR and ClearHealth.
Finally, from a resource perspective, these Hospital CIOs only have a small management team and staff that manage the day to day operations of the hospital. Without question they will need vendor and outside consulting firm assistance to help them on these many projects and initiatives. This will become yet another challenge for them as they diligently try to navigate through these difficult circumstances.
Which of those three camps do YOU belong in? Take the poll in the side bar and let us know what your concerns are in the comments!