Regulatory and Health Industry

CIO Focus Group Reveals Priorities for 2019

Chief information officers (CIOs) from the nation’s healthcare providers are divided amongst themselves in their views around whether patients are up to the challenge of managing their own healthcare data and records. CIO confidence in patients managing their own data, unsurprisingly, is highly correlated to the sophistication of a given provider’s health IT infrastructure, according to findings from a CIO focus group led by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) and LexisNexis Risk Solutions.

The CIO focus group included representatives from hospitals, nursing homes, and health plans who were brought together to provide information on what healthcare leaders’ top priorities are for 2019, according to a Fierce Healthcare summary of the focus group report. As Fierce Healthcare reported, one of the overarching questions CHIME and LexisNexis had was: how can providers be confident that a patient’s record is accurate and up to date if a patient has full access to it? Moreover, is a medical record more- or less-prone to errors than it would be if the patient didn’t have access to it?

According to the investigators, CIOs whose systems were more advanced in their electronic health record (EHR) adoption had a different set of priorities than CIOs whose organizations were at less advanced phases of adoption. But CIOs from both groups agreed that giving patients full access to their records in a universal format “is the future.”

The focus group also focused on topics such as: cybersecurity, interoperability, data governance and data quality, data analytics, and patient engagement.

The CIOs also seemed to share some consensus around the creation of a national patient identifier, although they weren’t optimistic about the prospects of such development.

[author] [author_image timthumb='on']/Portals/0/uploads/content_hub/Mary-Butler-author-photo.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Mary Butler is associate editor at Journal of AHIMA.[/author_info] [/author]

Tags: health industry