Poll for new national coordinator is rather laughable
Leave it to those in the ivory tower of Modern Healthcare to screw up something as simple as an unscientific poll about who should be the next national coordinator for health IT. The poll lists a whopping two dozen names, ranging from the obvious—Dr. John Halamka, Dr. Paul Tang, current deputy national coordinator Dr. Farzad Mostashari—to the dark horse—Dr. Robert Hitchcock of T-System, Paula Gregory of the “Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicince” (sic)—and even a few laughable listings.
For one thing, Dr. David Brailer is on the list. The first national coordinator (2004-06) left Washington because he wanted to be with his family in San Francisco. He’s currently running a $700 million equity investment firm and couldn’t possibly want to get back into the political game, could he? Besides, he’s a Republican. Dr. William Hersh, CMIO of Oregon Health and Science University, would make a good choice, but he’s already said he doesn’t want the job.
Another choice is current CMS Adminstrator Dr. Donald Berwick. Dirty politics is about to force him out, and if that happens, you can bet he won’t want to be within 400 miles of Washington. (Hey, that just happens to be the distance to his home in the Boston area.) I’m really steamed about the Berwick situation, and am preparing a separate post that hopefully will go up tomorrow.
Modern Healthcare also includes Janet Marchibroda, who’s identified as chief healthcare officer of IBM. Sorry, but Marchibroda, former CEO of the eHealth Initiative, left IBM last year. My sources tell me she’s now working at ONC, serving as de facto chief of staff to current coordinator Dr. David Blumenthal. (Blumenthal, as you no doubt know, is leaving in April.)
Missing from the long list of names is Johns Hopkins CIO Stephanie Reel, who won in a landslide the equally informal, unscientific poll that HIStalk ran a couple weeks ago. HIStalk did report, though, that Allscripts effectively stuffed the ballot box. Also not included is Blumenthal’s predecessor, Dr. Robert Kolodner, but he doesn’t want to go back, either.
I’m not going to run another survey here (hey, I doubt I have the readership to make it worthwhile anyway), but I’m curious if people think a non-physician could or should be national coordinator.
While it made me laugh as well to see who was nominated, you don’t have to be rude about it
Maybe it is time to put the whole cloud leadership concept on the line? ;-) How about a trifecta of a doc, an IT geek and consumer advocate? When Rob Kolodner was there he not only was a doc who had implemented a national EHR but was also a psychiatrist and understood organizational change. Ask him about charodic organizations some time.
Most of us who have been doing this for a few years know that it is hard to find one person who has 2 or 3 of the key qualities so you need at least 2 people heading up the implementation projects – a CMIO and a CIO who work side by side.
Or perhaps someone like Dr. Matt Handley – Group Health Seattle – implemented their patient centered EHR across the State then followed up with Medical Home model. (his bio is in the linked website).
@cascadia
I would say that it is possible for a non-physician with excellent business and communications acumen to be the leader BUT it would be absolutely necessary for this individual to have had direct experience with the impacts of Electronic Health Records on Providers both in an Ambulatory and Inpatient setting. In this role, it’s critical that you can still relate to what the Provider does on a day-day basis and to understand how healthcare IT impacts caring for the patient (which is the goal, right?). Of course, there are positives and negatives and the policies should promote the former and tackle the latter.
However, as you know there is still a large sense of respect and camaraderie between the folks that have spent their lives being committed to the title, M.D. In that regard, there is a challenge. However, the intimate understanding and observation of health IT in the clinical world is imperative.
In my role as a Physician Support leader on an Epic Inpatient implementation, I learned quickly that to be effective there were three things that needed to be considered: 1) knowledgeable (both in the clinical and technical sense), 2) trustworthy (#1 helped with this but building relationships and getting to know the Providers – who they are – was paramount, especially for the tenured guys and gals) and 3) available (being there on the floors, scrubbing in to the OR, driving out to an office allowed the insight into “how it really works” and provided a peek into what a Provider did or did not need to do). Our implementation was at over 85% CPOE after just a couple of weeks and has maintained (I check on those guys ;) a very high adoption rate with positive clinical metrics to support. I don’t think CPOE is the be-all-end-all but it’s obviously one of the more common measures.