With just three weeks to go before healthcare and healthcare IT leaders gather at the Healthcare Informatics Executive Summit, I’m pleased to be able to reveal that the judges in the Healthcare Informatics/AMDIS IT Innovation Advocate Award program, cosponsored by HCI and AMDIS, the Association of Medical Directors of Informatics, have rendered their verdict, and we have first-, second-, and third-place winning teams in the awards program. Of course, we’re withholding revealing the names of those winners until just before the Summit begins. We’d like to give the winners the recognition they deserve as their team-names are announced at the Summit.
But what I can say now is that we received a solid number of very distinguished submissions from healthcare teams nationwide. And those submissions reflect a cresting wave of innovation of all kinds in patient care organizations around the country. Not surprisingly, with healthcare reform-related mandates and the transition to the ICD-10 coding system upon us now, and with healthcare providers deeply involved in meeting the requirements of the meaningful use process under the HITECH Act, healthcare leaders are pioneering all sorts of new approaches to improving patient safety and care quality, operational efficiency, clinician effectiveness, and every other important dimension of process improvement. The operating environment right now certainly reminds one of the old adage, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”
What’s tremendously heartening is that healthcare leaders are creating teams to pioneer so many new advances, advances we will need if we are to move forward as a healthcare system and as a society. It’s wonderfully gratifying to be involved in all of this in at least a very modest way. What’s great about being a sponsor of an awards program is that the best of these programs are bringing forward the stories of the pioneers in our industry, and allowing others to hear those stories and potentially develop their own solutions based on the information and insights they can glean from leaders in organizations outside their own.
It will be great to share the names of our winning teams as we prepare to open the HCI Executive Summit, and to share their stories. In the meantime, I want to take this opportunity to thank all of those teams whose members entered submissions to our awards program. What a wonderful wave of innovation they’re all a part of! Please make sure to come to the Executive Summit, too, so you can hear the insights and perspectives of industry leaders as we move forward in this time of intense change and development in healthcare.