Top IT Priorities According to Healthcare Leaders

As healthcare leaders, you have the hard job of knowing what to prioritize in your organization.  Every leader is inundated with ideas, projects, and new technology that could help their organization better care for patients.  Sorting through all of these can be a challenge.

What makes this challenge even harder is all the latest buzzwords that keep cropping up and distract our focus.  Being able to know when a buzzword is worthy of your attention is the sign of a great leader.  That often means focusing on the less sexy parts of healthcare IT while you allow the cutting edge technology to mature.

In a survey sponsored by Halo Health, we asked healthcare leaders to identify their most important health IT priorities.  Here’s a summary of what more than 140 healthcare leaders shared:

The top two priorities will likely come as no surprise to anyone in health IT.  Given the number of security incidents and ransomware cases, I’d be upset if data security wasn’t the top priority for a healthcare organization.  Between moving to value based care and the 21st Century Cures Act, interoperability is also on every healthcare organization’s mind.

What I found more interesting was the next two most important priorities: Clinical Communication and EHR Optimization.  I think we all understand the importance of both of these areas, but I also think many of us would have thought these were already implemented and therefore less of a priority now.  However, these survey results clearly indicate that bread and butter things like clinical communication and EHR optimization are still things that can be improved.

What’s surprising to me is that these four priorities beat out the likes of AI, Patient Engagement, Remote Patient Monitoring, and Telehealth.  Who doesn’t want to say they’re working on the latest AI project?  That feels exciting and cutting edge.  However, the above results seem to say that there’s more value for a healthcare organization to work on clinical communication than to go chasing after the latest AI or telehealth solution.

Does this mean a healthcare organization should just ignore talk about the latest technologies being demonstrated at their favorite health IT conference or publication?  Of course not.  Leadership is about finding the right balance between new innovative projects that will disrupt your previous work and projects that will accelerate and optimize some of the technology and solutions you’ve already implemented.

Plus, let’s not discount many of the innovations that are happening in data security, interoperability, clinical communication, and EHR optimization.  When you look at the opportunities in all four of these areas, they are things we could have barely even considered 5-10 years ago.  Technologies for securing your organization and for quick recovery in the event of an incident are so much more mature.  Devices and connectivity are nearly ubiquitous now which provides amazing opportunities for clinical communication.  Standards for interoperability have come a long way and are getting better all the time.

What are the top IT priorities in your healthcare organization?  Do they align with the above survey results?  Are there any surprises you see in the results above?  Let us know in the comments.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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