In 2018, healthcare CIOs will focus on EHR integration (71 percent) and secure messaging user adoption (54 percent), according to the results of a survey fielded by Spok.
Spok, a clinical communication solutions company, asked 46 CIO members of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives about their challenges and goals for health IT in the years to come.
Here are seven things to know.
1. Forty percent of respondents cited deploying an enterprise analytics platform as a top priority for 2018.
2. Sixty-five percent of CIOs said their organization is working to bring mobile elements into unified strategy, but 25 percent are not developing a mobile care team strategy.
3. When asked what is driving their mobile technology selection, CIOs cited secure messaging and communications among care teams (79 percent), receiving alerts from clinical systems (60 percent) and critical test results alerts (60 percent).
4. Half of respondents said their organization has a patient experience officer or some equivalent.
5. Forty-five percent of CIOs said their organizations are evolving patient portals to support population health initiatives.
6. In the next 18 months, CIOs cited physician IT adoption and buy-in (62 percent) and optimizing EHR integration with other hospital systems (38 percent) as top priorities.
7. CIOs said they gain physician buy-in by including clinician representatives on the planning committee (80 percent) and developing internal champions (76 percent).
Click here to access the complete survey data.