One Expert Looks at Attestation

What’s your advice for CIOs and other healthcare IT leaders who are in those catch-up types of situations?
I would advise them to pay very close attention to governance, decision-making, change management, and strong clinical sponsorship. If you have those things, the technology will take care of itself. But you’ve got to align all those things. Every project we get called into here at Deloitte, they’re having a problem in one or more of those areas. They’re not having problems tuning up their servers.

The organizations I see that are more advanced in terms of their development of clinical IT all have strong CIO, CMIO, and clinician leadership. Would you agree?
Absolutely. Conversely, in those situations in which the executive team just hands off the ball to IT, those implementations aren’t going as well. The more opportunity for the full involvement of the executive team, the greater the chance of success.

Will those organizations that have chosen a sole-source clinical IT vendor strategy will be advantaged?
On the one hand, the simpler your architecture, the easier it will be. On the other hand, we’re doing a lot of ICD-10 remediation work right now, and we’re finding that patient care organizations always have 20 or 30 vendors involved in that regard. Still, in terms of meaningful use, the simpler, the better.

Any other impressions, thoughts, at this watershed moment?
It’s a very exciting period of time. I remember when the HITECH Act first came out, and some people said, we’re never going to get the money. Now, some people have attested, and they’ll get a check in May. By the way, one other advantage of waiting to attest is that you’ll learn from others’ mistakes. Six months from now, people will be talking about best practices, what didn’t work, what they could have done better. So you might as well wait and find out what others have experienced; that’s just another reason to be sure you’re on the winning side.