Healthcare CIO: Final Report

The 14th Annual HIMSS Leadership Survey indicates that information technology executives increasingly believe that information technology must be implemented to reduce medical errors and promote patient safety. As IT executives aim to improve patient safety, they are turning their attentions to appropriate technologies. For example, IT executives in this survey cite computer-based practitioner order entry (CPOE) as the most important application that their healthcare organizations need to implement in the next two years. With a number of critical 2003 deadlines approaching, compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, or HIPAA, remains a top concern for information technology executives.

Other key findings of the survey include:

• Financial support: Executives in this survey said they are still not receiving enough financial support from their organizations to implement IT. Some 23 percent said this lack of financial support was the top barrier to implementation. Also cited as a barrier was vendors’ inability to provide products that meet crucial needs.
  
  
• Important applications: This survey's IT executives consider CPOE and bar coding applications to be an important technology for their healthcare organizations as they use information technology in efforts to improve patient safety. Also, more executives cite interest in computer-based patient records. Nearly one in five executives responding to the survey reported that their organizations have a fully operational CPR system in place.
  
  
• Security concerns: IT executives in healthcare organizations are more worried about internal breaches of security. Some 55 percent of respondents to the 2003 Leadership Survey said this was their biggest concern, compared with 46 percent the previous year.
  
  
• Top technologies: There’s been rapid growth in adoption of wireless information systems, data security applications and extensible markup language (XML) among healthcare organizations represented in this survey. Adoption of application service provider-based (ASP) approaches also is expected to double in the next two years.
  
  
• Internet applications: Also on the increase will be the functionality of Web sites for consumers. In the next two years, more Web sites will enable access to medical records and health assessment applications, respondents predict.

Other notable findings include:

• More healthcare organizations will outsource IT functions over the next two years. Even so, IT staffing needs and budgets will continue to rise, although at slower rates than in past years. More than two-thirds of respondents said they believe their IT operating budgets would increase.
  
  
• The majority of respondents indicated they were satisfied with the products and services they receive from suppliers and consultants. Fewer than 10 percent reported dissatisfaction with these vendors.