Government Regulations Overwhelming Hospital CIOs

I was recently talking with a hospital CIO about the challenges that he faces as a hospital CIO today. This hospital CIO has been doing it for a long time and so I was quite interested to hear his perspective on the changes in his job.

His response was telling. He recounted how he kept a powerpoint slide which covers all of the areas and projects he’s responsible for as a hospital CIO. Over time that slide had grown into a lengthy list of responsibilities, but he’d also modified the slide into two different lists. The new list he created was all the government regulations he was required to deal with as a hospital CIO. He then told me that the list of government regulations was as long as the rest of the list.

This is not surprising for those of us in the healthcare space. Without even effort I can list the alphabet soup of government health IT regulations: MU, ACO, ICD-10, EHR, 5010, etc. Plus, that doesn’t even include all of the various healthcare regulations that tangentially impact healthcare IT.

No doubt all of these government regulations can be overwhelming to any healthcare IT organization and its leaders. Although, I’m also concerned at the impact this will have to innovation in these hospital IT organizations.

We’ve seen how meaningful use has nearly stopped innovation in EHRs. It seems that wave after wave of government healthcare regulations are doing the same. When does a hospital CIO have time to do innovative things when they can barely keep their head above water dealing with government regulations?

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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