New England Innovation: Collaborative IT Foundations for Accountable Care

Yes, some of the heavier business intelligence tools come in there, and we’re using SAP for those. Those tools will be rolling out over the next three to four months; the data model is already done. What needs to be done is creating the data marts; the basic data mart model is done, it’s just a matter of serving up the configurations, and a few additional applications as well.

What do you hope will happen over the next year or two?

Our hopes are really to build out the full information suites so that these healthcare systems, which really are in a very new environment, that they become successful, and that we can be a true component in their success. So there are a lot of technical issues, but the most difficult ones are cultural and organizational. We physicians are smart and organized to work in the environment we’re in, and that happens to be primarily fee-for-service. And the entire way that the healthcare system is organized is optimized for the fee-for-service environment. So recognizing that you’ll actually have to keep people out of your office, and coordinating care, all those things are challenging.

What advice might you want to share with hospital, medical group, and health system CIOs and CMIOs?

I think one piece of advice is, be somewhat humble about what you can get done in a short period of time, both technically and culturally. Second, this is going to become a much larger proportion of their time and energy, and it’s time to start investing in it now, because there’s going to be rapid change in healthcare, and they don’t want to get left behind.