I had not been in contact Patty Lavely since she proudly walked off the stage with the CIO of the Year Award for her category last year. She is a clearly a very sharp person and I had been looking forward to this conversation.

 “Like so many other CIOs from healthcare organizations, I am exploring the HiTech Act within theAmerican Recovery and Reinvestment Act in search of guidance, clues and ideas for what we need to be doing to insure our organization is where we need to be. We and all others will need to increase the use of the Emergency Healthcare Records (EMR) and the path to follow is not clear. So that is what we are doing Mike.”

 There are many good things that will logically come from the full implementation of these mega-spending federal programs, but the absence of proper guidance is absorbing a lot of energy these days. Each healthcare related CIO seems to be working independently on the same issue. It is not exactly a Rubik’s Cube but it might be called an EMR Cube. Finding the right answer seems to require a lot of trial and error.

 While the path to success is not exactly clear, there does seem to be a consensus that a few software companies are going to have true windfall opportunities. Once the final guidance from Washington is made clear, most healthcare organizations are going to be clamoring to receive priority attention from those few software companies. (More about this when we talk with Lisa Lavelle of McKesson.)

 Other projects on the list included making major changes in their data center operations. “We are moving over to blade and VMware in a few months, so we are looking around to learn of the experiences of others. We will make our decisions in a few months, but I want to touch base with a few who have already made that same journey. We know we can save a lot of money so we might as well do it right and save a bunch.”

We ended the conversation with some talk about who she might nominate for the CIO of the Year Awards and a little chat about our mutual friends in Savannah. Howard and Mary Morrison seem to be connected with all things good that happen in this area.

By Mike Adkinson

March 2010