• September 2008 FEATURE ARTICLES •
The Healthcare CIO
Jonathan Teich, M.D.
Chief Medical Informatics Officer, Elsevier
Jonathan Teich, M.D., PhD, is CMIO for
Elsevier, a leading publisher of scientific, technical and
health information. He also serves as assistant professor of
medicine at Harvard Medical School and as a board-certified
attending physician in emergency medicine at Brigham and Women’s
Hospital, where he has practiced since 1983. In the early 1990s,
he founded the Brigham and Women’s Center for Applied Medical
Information Systems. He has been active in medical informatics
and health information technology for more than twenty years.
Dr. Teich has authored or co-authored more
than 100 peer-reviewed papers, books and editorials on medical
informatics and healthcare information systems. He participates
in numerous industry groups and government leadership councils,
including the Roadmap for National Action on Clinical Decision
Support, and boards and committees of the Health Information
Management Systems Society and American Medical Informatics
Association. He also is a member of the American Health
Information Community’s Quality Workgroup and a fellow in the
American College of Medical Informatics.
Q HMT: What are the chief differences between a
CIO and a CMIO?
"The CIO is traditionally someone who has
operational responsibility for the information technology of an
organization, and certainly plays an important role in
supporting those needs across the hospital. Generally, the CMIO
is a person, usually a physician, who provides a bridge between
practical medical needs and information technology capabilities.
Usually, it is someone who has a solid understanding of both,
and who is there to translate clinical strategy into information
technology possibilities and vice versa."
Q HMT: Would you characterize the CMIO as a bridge
between CIO and the clinical side of medicine?
"Many organizations need to have someone in
each role, and in these cases, they do work closely together.
Certainly, the most successful organizations that have CIOs and
CMIOs do have them working as very closely coordinated teams.
However, I don’t think that the CMIO may necessarily be
qualified to make entire hospitalwide purchasing decisions about
technology operations or physical plant, as a CIO does. On the
other hand, the CIO may be very well suited to those
responsibilities, but may not always be as knowledgeable about
clinical and healthcare strategies. In these instances,
certainly, there needs to be a bridge spanning the information
technology capabilities and the clinical and health strategy
needs of an organization. CMIOs function in a variety of ways
and may report to a CIO in some cases. More often though,
they’re reporting to the chief medical officer, the chief
quality officer or to a VP of clinical excellence — or a
similar, senior clinical role — so they’re really bridging those
two disciplines."
Q HMT: Given the blending of IT and clinical technologies, is it an advantage today for CIOs to also be medical doctors?
"Organizations are still hiring CIOs with
both of those roles in mind, and the best CIOs understand a
great deal about healthcare processes and operations. But as IT
plays an increasingly significant role in day-to-day operations,
it is advantageous to separate and delineate the IT-leadership
and medical-applications roles, to allow specific skill sets to
be applied to each discipline. In general, a CIO doesn’t need to
be a physician, and the question is whether you compromise some
other capabilities on the vital IT and strategic sides of the
CIO’s job if you require that."
Q HMT: How should CMIOs prepare today for the IT-driven evolution of healthcare?
"They need to do what good CMIOs do, which is
be aware of both healthcare trends and technology trends.
"The well-informed CMIO, whether in a
healthcare organization or in industry, needs to know what’s
coming down from Medicare; as well as, new never event
preventions from the National Quality Forum, and also be aware
of both new guidelines and new methods that may be coming out to
make those guidelines computable and whether these methods have
reached a computable state.
"So, CMIOs are an interfaced position. They
need to be aware of both what the new needs are and what the new
possible technologies are."
Q HMT: Should CMIOs act partly as educators for patients as well as other officers of the
organization?
"It is very important to have an education
role, or certainly a communications component at the very least.
In some ways, the CMIO is the ultimate clinician champion.
"I’ve talked for many years about how there
are different roles for physicians in HIT in the provider
setting. One of the most important roles is the champion, which
is a senior clinician who is paying very close attention to new
technologies, who is personally involved in the implementation
of new applications, and who also participates in decisions
about emerging strategic issues. In addition, the champion
functions as the early adopter who can communicate with peers.
"As a respected clinician, when a new
implementation is under way and going through its inevitable
bumps, the champion can stand up and say, ‘I tried this several
weeks or months before you, [and] you can trust me that we’ll
get past this bump.’ This is vitally important to gaining
adoption for a complex project.
"When I worked in [Information Systems] at
Brigham and Women’s, we sometimes defined a small project as
something where people hate you for two weeks and a large
project as one where people hate you for two months."
Q HMT: You are involved in the research and development of healthcare IT solutions.
Do you find being an M.D. makes you
particularly well suited for that type of work?
"I basically have three roles for Elsevier:
the first is strategy and broad program planning; second is
helping to envision and design innovative products; and, third
is maintaining the connection between Elsevier and external
industry, academic and government entities and activities. These
roles require a number of different kinds of work experiences.
Being an active physician, I have opportunities to see practical
examples of how information is used and how it is changing – as
they say, ‘I’m also a client,’ – and to bring those ideas from
clinical practice back to be applied at Elsevier. Really, not a
shift goes by in the Emergency Department at Brigham and Women’s
when I don’t encounter at least one clinical case for which I
really wish I had a new feature or a new information tool that
could help me with that case. Additionally, as an M.D., a CMIO
probably has a greater degree of confidence in interacting with
other physicians in hospitals and other practices — they are
often most comfortable speaking with another physician."
Q HMT: What would you tell your students on the CMIO path that are still in their education phase to be looking forward to in the next five years?
"I think that they’ll be able to look forward
to more organizations understanding both informatics and the
CMIO role itself. I think that this will become increasingly a
standard part of the roles in a healthcare organization. I also
think it will become an increasingly common job in healthcare
technology companies and healthcare knowledge companies. So
first of all, you will see greater recognition of the need, as
the Internet and all of our technology backgrounds continue to
evolve. We will see more of the informatics training programs
understanding this as well, and making sure that students have
appropriate backgrounds not only on the technology side but also
the business side. Even now we are starting to see combined
Informatics and MBA programs, where people get a chance to
understand healthcare business as well."
