Eileen Mullin, RN, is a health information management consultant to Michigan Surgical Hospital in Warren. She previously served as the director of health information management for nearly four years.
Here, she discusses the partnerships CIOs and other IT leaders should forge in healthcare and their communities to prepare for the future.
Question: Who are the most crucial partners for your hospital or health system's IT department today?
Eileen Mullin: The most important partners in health IT are independent consultants who are managed and paid by a central department within our system. The skills and expertise needed to cope with our quickly changing regulatory and clinical needs mean we need highly specialized talent who know our customized systems and know how our unique facilities fit into CMS's structure. A large group of independent contractors requires their efforts to be coordinated from inside the organization.
Q: In the future, what types of partnerships and relationships do you foresee investing the most time and resources in?
EM: In the future, companies that can manage the specialized talent to do a much needed EHR migration will be key. These companies will need to see the broad picture while tackling the vast amount of crucial details needed to both keep patients safe and meet regulatory needs.
Q: How do you see your role changing in the next one to five years?
EM: I am the former director of HIM. When our facility was purchased, some staff stayed on in this capacity to assist with the transition. However, my former role was so new to many of my colleagues that my main challenge was clarifying HIM's role.
A key part was instituting information governance so that the right clinical staff had responsibility for EHR decisions affecting clinical outcomes. Many high-level clinical staff are hesitant to involve themselves with EHR design because they feel it is HIT's responsibility, but patient safety is directly impacted by EHRs. Even though I am also an RN, more specialized expertise is needed to make many EHR decisions. The days of IT running the EHR are over; HIT needs to insure there is an information governance platform so clinical staff can confidently contribute to the EHR and clearly understand the implications of their choices.
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