One-on-One With Kings County Hospital Center Medical Director (and former CMIO) Abha Agrawal, M.D., Part I

Kings County Hospital Center is a 630-bed tertiary-care academic medical center in Brooklyn, N.Y. As medical director, Abha Agrawal, M.D., is responsible for providing leadership for its 850+ medical staff, while supervising quality, patient safety, risk management, health information management and research. But that’s not all she does. Agrawal also finds time to serve as a board member of the NYCLIX RHIO and as a commissioner for CCHIT. A former CMIO, she recently took time to talk with HCI Editor-in-Chief Anthony Guerra about how her former role is evolving, and what she’ll be looking for in a replacement.

GUERRA: Tell me about your career path.

AGRAWAL: A few months ago, I got promoted to be medical director, or CMO essentially, for the hospital. Before this, I was the CMIO for Central Brooklyn Family Health Network, which consists of Kings County Hospital (a 630-bed acute care tertiary hospital), a diagnostic and treatment center, and a nursing home. We are a part of New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, which is the largest municipal system in the country. Outside of the VA, it’s the largest public health system in the country.

GUERRA: Do you have the CMIO report to you now?

AGRAWAL: I have to fill the position now. When I do, yes, that person will report to me.

GUERRA: You’re obviously very interested in informatics. You’re a board member with the NYCLIX – RHIO, you’re a commissioner at CCHIT, and you were a CMIO, have you made a career decision to leave informatics behind?

AGRAWAL: Actually, I gave a lot of thought to this, and I think not. This also goes to your question about the overall role of the CMIO in the organization. I have always believed the CMIO should be reporting to the CMO. So my sense, on a personal level, was that because the CMIO will report to me, it will give me an opportunity to continue to mentor a new CMIO and bring them into the fold. Secondly, I think health IT has become so integral — through our clinical and business operations — that as a CMO, the more you know about informatics, the more you stay involved in informatics, the more effective you can be.

My informatics background and knowledge will really help me with the CMO job as well because everything we do, so much of what we do as CMOs — so much of what I did as CMIO in terms of supporting the clinical operations — needs to be supported by health IT. So many of our performance indicators, so many of our quality reports, so much of our patient safety efforts — all of which are part of my job as a director — are directly related to health IT. So I think there is not a choice between being a CMIO and a CMO because as a CMO, though you have other rules and responsibilities, many of them intersect with health IT.

GUERRA: In your governance model, you said a best practice is to have the CMIO reporting to the CMO; where would the CIO live in that org chart?

AGRAWAL: I had a great relationship with our CIO, and I think that was crucial for both of us to be successful. So the reason I think it’s better for the CMIO to report to the CMO is that they are both M.D.s and a physician’s professional growth happens in a very different environment than the growth of people who are IT professionals. There are significant cultural differences.

I’ll give you one example. When I finished my residency, I practiced for two years at the VA, and I was very enthusiastic about the VA system. I saw firsthand how much IT can transform the way we provide care. So I decided to do a fellowship in informatics at Yale. Before that, I was a fulltime clinician. My first few months, when I had to very actively interact with IT professionals, it gave me a firsthand idea of how different they are from clinicians. We live in two very different worlds, and we have been doing that for many years.