CMIO and EMR

Today I am going to talk about the role of the chief medical information officer and their importance with EMR. In this post, I have posted a copy of what Wikipedia says about CMIOs.I found it very informative. I work very closely with our CMIO since I am involved in the EMR. I was more involved in the education, training and curriculum design and some systems development. Our CMIO does pretty much everything the article says. He continues to practice emergency medicine in the same hospital. He already had experience in programming and was approached my the CMO to work in this position.He was involved in the making of policies, which we heavily rely upon for new builds. I find it interesting that the position came into existence around 1992. In 2012, we are still just starting out in implementing these EMRs to many hospitals. This job is vital to any organization. I was amazed at how knowledgeable our CMIO was to all of the cerner EMR functionality. Seeing how he was involved in the policy building, the executive meetings, the informatics team and programming himself has made me understand how this position keeps the EMR running. And also keeps funding in the hospital with all the reporting going into the meaningful use. Another thing the article mentioned was keeping up credibility with other physicians and this is very true. Many of the physicians I worked with were not pleased with the system because they felt they had no voice. Having a peer who still understands what they are going through and is playing an active roll in programming yields much faith, respect and patience. A chief medical informatics officer (CMIO, also sometimes referred to as a chief medical information officer) is a healthcare executive generally responsible for the health informatics platform required to work with clinical IT staff [1] to support the efficient design, implementation, and use of health technology within a healthcare organization. Typically the CMIO is a physician[2] with some degree of formal health informatics training or a working equivalent thereof, who often works in conjunction with, or helps to manage other physician, nurse, pharmacy, and general informaticists within the organization. According to the 2012 CMIO Survey, 60% had salaries higher than $200,000 per year.[3] While historically there have been physicians and others filling this role, the more formal CMIO position started around 1992 [4] to help hospitals support the adoption and implementation of health technologies such as electronic medical records (EMRs), electronic health records (EHRs), computerized physician order entry (CPOE), electronic documentation, health information exchanges (HIEs), and other technologies used in the clinical setting. The trend for healthcare organizations to have a CMIO has continued to grow, and accelerated as technology use in the clinical setting has been stimulated by programs such as the 2009 HITECH (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health) Act. CMIOs generally report to either the chief medical officer (CMO), chief information officer (CIO), chief operations officer (COO), or chief executive officer (CEO). The exact roles and responsibilities vary widely [5][6][7], from organization to organization, often depending on the reporting structure [8], but they typically include at least one of the following: Strategic planning EMR Governance and Policy development Systems development and implementation Stakeholder engagement Capacity Building [9] Informatics education and platform development[10] Data mining and quality reporting Education, Training and curriculum design Some CMIOs continue to practice clinical medicine, to some degree, to help maintain credibility with other physicians, but this is not essential.