Q: How can I determine if my Disaster Recovery Plan is up-to-date and, most of all, still workable?
A: Everyone knows that having a well-documented Disaster Recovery Plan is a necessary part of doing business. But when was the last time you re-visited your plan, made sure that everything is still current with respect to [...]

Q: How can I be sure we are getting the highest payback from our investments in IT?
A: Unfortunately, a five- or seven-year Strategic IT Plan is rarely used in many healthcare organizations, and if one exists, everyone should be using at a minimum a three-year rolling Plan to ensure IT investments are being made in a fashion that [...]

Q: We need help with our IT planning and are short on funds. What should we do?
A: To get the most “bang for your buck” you should begin by conducting a comprehensive overview assessment. The results of such an assessment will define short-term priorities and provide valuable insights towards the development of a [...]

Happy New Year. Over the holidays I read the article in the December 22, 2009 Healthcare Finance Newsweek which according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Health Institute published a report called “Squeezing every penny out of healthcare costs.”
The primary emphasis in 2010 will be on reducing costs in the healthcare industry. What bothers me [...]

I often see articles regarding change management in organizations, utilization of business intelligence and optimizing the workforce to optimize value in the organization as well as aligning actual performance with strategic initiatives. Rarely do I see much of this being done in the healthcare field which in my opinion is the reason most healthcare organizations [...]

National Coordinator for Health Information Technology David Blumenthal e-mailed an open letter last week. In it he discussed “meaningful use.” He declared the concept “simple and inspiring.” But don’t throw away the HIT Policy Committee matrix just yet. The not-so simple matrix is still going to be a critical part of getting the incentive payments [...]

Freezing, putting on hold, resizing, scaling down, deferring and even ignoring the economy is the current state of budgets, projects, and plans in hospitals across the country. This economic climate creates a circumstance to look at what you currently have with renewed optimism. Hospitals need to take a new current look at their employees, technology, [...]

Anybody remember the CHIN? For those who don’t a CHIN is a community health information network. What’s that you ask? Let me define it by giving you the new name… RHIO – Regional Health Information Organization. Back in the 1990s healthcare attempted to share information between hospitals. They failed for a variety of reasons. The [...]

I spoke with a CFO the other day. You’ll never believe this. He can’t get the financial information he needs out of the legacy financial system that is running thanks to two paper clips, bubble gum, a matchbook and some McGyver-like geek working in the bowels of the hospital where the IT Director has his [...]

Ever since HITECH section of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) become a topic of conversation, there has been speculation as to what role Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) and Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) would play. I said it then, and recent moves by both standards groups only reinforces [...]