HIPAA and Beyond Healthcare Information & Management Systems Society survey

by David Orenstein free-lance writer

Managing healthcare information technology is a game of managing competing priorities. For the last few years, ensuring compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act has been the priority that has won out. With major deadlines now past, HIPAA’s grip is finally loosening, making way for other priorities to compete for resources, according to a recent survey of healthcare chief information officers.

The 15th Annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Leadership Survey shows that CIOs are eager to get on with business-related priorities such as implementing wireless networks, redesigning processes and workflow, and training workers. The survey of 307 CIOs at healthcare facilities of various sizes was taken last winter and was released at the HIMSS annual conference in late February (www.himss.org/2004survey/ASP/index.asp).

HIPAA hardly is water under the bridge. Ensuring that IT security is compliant remains a priority of 48 percent of the CIOs, a higher percentage than any other priority. Other HIPAA-related priorities, however, have dropped steeply. Only 14 percent of the CIOs say ensuring privacy compliance is a priority in the recent survey, compared to 46 percent the previous year. Only 17 percent say they need to make compliance regarding electronic data transfers a priority, compared to 29 percent in 2002. What’s more, only 25 percent of the CIOs expect HIPAA security to be a priority in two years. Clearly, the work of HIPAA compliance is getting done. The will of the people has been acknowledged and the will of the CIO is coming back to the fore.

Among non-HIPAA priorities, taking steps to reduce medical errors and improve patient safety remain popular (47 percent say it is a priority), although a little less so than in 2002 (52 percent). The real action is among the up-and-comers mentioned above: Wireless networks were a priority of only 20 percent of CIOs in 2002 but now have the attention of 37 percent. Process redesign has climbed from 16 percent to 32 percent, and training has vaulted from 15 percent in 2002 to 26 percent just a year later.

One way to read the shift in priorities is that there has been a shift in the healthcare agenda. After years of being reactive to the priorities of Congress (which enacted HIPAA) and the Institute of Medicine (which called national attention to medical errors), CIOs are leaning more toward the business needs of their organizations. CIOs ranked surviving cost pressures and improving customer satisfaction as the No. 2 and 3 business issues of the next two years, behind reducing medical errors. Sure enough, wireless networking, worker training, and redesigned processes are all about improving business practices and productivity, which is central to satisfying customers while suppressing costs.

Looking forward, the priority with the biggest growth over the next two years will be the implementation of electronic medical records, which has both political and business appeal. This holy grail of health care, however, is a perennial dream that can be fulfilled only with great effort. When this column reported on the HIMSS Leadership Survey in 2001, only 13 percent of CIOs said they had fully operational systems. That figure jumped to 19 percent in the 2002 survey and didn’t budge last year.

But progress in health care IT certainly is possible. In 2001, HIPAA had just taken over the title of “most common priority” from deploying Internet technologies. Now HIPAA is fading and other priorities are taking hold. Perhaps in a few years, healthcare CIOs will be able to say they have made patients safer and better served, and kept costs in line.

David Orenstein is a technology and business writer in Silicon Valley. To learn more about a technology topic in Computing Care, e-mail him at davealli@comcast.net.