Who’s Over MACRA? CIO? COO?

In no surprising way, MACRA is a major topic in pretty much every hospital and health system in the US. There’s a lot of money to be had or lost with MACRA. This is especially true for health systems with a lot of providers. Plus, it sets the foundation for the future as well. I believe MACRA will be as impactful as meaningful use, but without as many incentive payments (chew on that idea for a minute).

As I’ve talked to hundreds of organizations about MACRA, I’ve seen a whole array of responses for how they’re addressing MACRA and who is in charge. Is this a CIO responsibility since MACRA certainly requires EHR and other technology? Is this a COO job because MACRA is more of an operations problem than it is a technical problem? Some might make the case for the CMO/CMIO to be in charge since MACRA requires so much involvement from your providers.

From my experience, the decision usually comes down to choosing between the CIO and the COO, but with input and buy-in from the CMO/CMIO. How the CIO positions themselves will determine if they are over MACRA or not. Some CIOs see themselves as tech people and so they shy away from touching MACRA. Other CIOs see themselves as integral part of their business success and so they want to have MACRA under their purview. Most progressive CIOs that I talk to want the later.

I’m an advocate for a CIO that’s involved in the business side of things. Those CIOs that don’t want this duty are going to miss out on strategic opportunities for their organization. I heard one CIO describe that they viewed their IT organization as Information As A Service provider. Their job as the IT department was just to provide the information from the IT systems to someone else who would deal with the information, the MACRA regulations, etc.

The Information as a Service provider concept has issues on multiple levels. The most important is that if you’re just an information provider, then you lose out on the opportunity to be a strategic part of your organization. However, from a more practical MACRA level, it’s really challenging to provide the right information for MACRA when you’re just an information provider and know little about the regulation. We all know how quickly communication can break down when the person needing the information is disconnected from the people who provide the information and they’re disconnected from the people entering the information.

No doubt a healthcare CIO has to be careful what projects they add to their plate. However, I don’t think MACRA is one of those projects that should be pushed off to someone else. Certainly there can be specific organization cultures where it makes sense for the COO to run things, but I think that should be pretty rare.

How are you approaching MACRA at your organization? Who’s over it? I look forward to hearing your experiences 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.

   

Categories