Healthcare CMO: Final Report

When asked to identify the business issues that would affect healthcare in the next two years, 74 percent of respondents identified availability and retention of staff. Other significant issues include increasing patient safety/reducing medical errors and Medicare cutbacks, each identified by 57 percent of respondents. Cost pressures were also identified by over half of the respondents—53 percent.

Increased competition and complying with managed care requirements, were each identified by four percent of respondents, and the National Healthcare Information Infrastructure (NHII) was identified by only two percent of respondents. None of the physician or nursing executives in this study identified mergers or consolidations between organizations as a healthcare issue in the next two years.

Respondents also were asked to identify the single most significant barrier to successfully implementing IT solutions intended to improve the patient care process. The top four responses were: lack of adequate financial support for IT (21 percent), vendors’ inability to effectively deliver satisfactory products or services (17 percent), difficulty in proving quantifiable benefits or ROI (15 percent) and the lack of a strategic IT plan or failure to execute an implementation plan (13 percent).

Physician and nursing executives in this study indicated that they believe IT improves the level of patient care. Almost half—45 percent—indicated that IT improves patient care, and 11 percent said that IT greatly improves the level of care that patients receive. Only three percent of respondents indicated that IT decreased the level of care patients receive.

Specifically, almost half of respondents (45 percent) indicated that reducing medical errors and improving patient safety would be the areas in which IT would have the most impact on patient care. This was followed by implementation of enterprise-wide systems, such as master patient indexes or enterprise resource planning systems (23 percent), and clinical transformation (17 percent). Only two percent of respondents indicated that IT would improve patient care by mitigating staff shortages.

More than half of the respondents (57 percent) indicated that physicians, nurses and other practitioners at their organization had secure, on-line access to clinical patient information, such as laboratory results, from a remote, non-hospital location. However, when placed in the context of areas in which IT can have the most impact on patient care, this is not a top issue; only seven percent of respondents identified obtaining medical records from a remote location—compared with 45 percent who identified reducing medical errors.

One quarter of the respondents (27 percent) indicated that their facility’s IT plan mirrors the clinical plan of the organization, and another 53 percent indicated that the alignment was somewhat close. Only 11 percent suggested that alignment between an IT strategic plan and the organizational plan was not at all close. Perhaps this alignment can be explained by the fact that 56 percent of clinical executives in this survey indicated that they were a part of their organization’s IT Steering Committee/IT Decision Making Team for some projects. Another 35 percent indicated involvement on this type of committee for all projects.
Three-quarters of respondents were confident in their facility’s IT department’s ability to consistently deliver on-time, on-budget projects. Specifically, 19 percent reported a high degree of confidence, and half reported some degree of confidence. Only two percent reported having no confidence in the IT department at their facility.

Most (69 percent) of the respondents in this survey indicated that their facilities IT operating budget would increase for 2003. Specifically, 40 percent of respondents indicated that the IT operating budget at their facility would definitely increase in 2003; 29 percent indicated that such an increase was probable. Approximately 10 percent indicated a probable or definite budget decrease.

Nearly one-third of respondents (29 percent) believed that more than 30% of their facility’s IT spending is controlled outside of the IT department. Another 29 percent believed that 20% or less of the budget was controlled outside of the IT department. Only 14 percent indicated that the entire budget was controlled exclusively by the IT department.