Highlights From CHIME/HIMSS CIO Forum 2012

The CHIME/HIMSS CIO Spring Forum played to a packed house at the Venetian-Palazzo-Sands Expo Center in Las Vegas on February 19 and 20.

More than 500 attendees attended the day-long keynote presentations, and other activities dotted the week of the 2012 HIMSS Conference and Exposition.

With the Spring Conference, CHIME began the formal launch of festivities celebrating its 20th anniversary. The morning session began with congratulatory messages from a variety of healthcare luminaries, including ONC head Farzad Mostashari, HIMSS CEO Stephen Lieber, AHIMA’s CEO Lynne Thomas Gordon, AHA CEO Rich Umbdenstock, and others. Watch the video here.

(CHIME members can continue to get in on the year-long celebration by visiting and posting comments to CHIME’s Facebook page, located at www.facebook.com/CIOCHIME. As part of our 20th anniversary celebration, we are encouraging CHIME members, past members and other partners to share their CHIME stories via video. Throughout the next few months, we want to share the videos with others via Facebook and other social media outlets.)

The opening keynote by Ken Blanchard, author and consultant, challenged attendees to unleash the power of vision in their work settings. Leaders must set out their approach, which he termed their leadership point of view. “You have to be clear on what your leadership point of view is, and be willing to share it with people,” he said. “I’m a servant leader; the only way to get great results and great human satisfaction together.”

Blanchard explored the four levels of change, with the easiest involving adding knowledge. The next hardest is changing attitude. The third hardest to change is individual behavior. At the top of the list as most difficult is organizational behavior, Blanchard said.

In the next keynote, Paul Grundy, president of the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative, explained how the patient-centered medical home would be empowered by the use of health information technology, specifically electronic health records.

“The medical home will fundamentally drive transformation; it will be built on IT, on data actionable at point of care,” Grundy said. “It’s a no brainer to re-engineer a system with data that’s available and can be used to hold providers accountable. Different tools are needed to enable accountable care, because otherwise buyers won’t want to buy from you anymore.”

In the afternoon sessions, Wendy Sue Swanson, MD, provided a picture of how patients will engage the care-giving community through the use of social media, and how organizations can prepare for the changes ahead. “I don’t think you have a choice with social media. Everyone else uses their celebrity to get a message out,” she said.

In the closing keynote, Lowell Catlett, economist and futurist, provided a different view of the resources that Baby Boomers would be able to spend on healthcare and how IT can help enable the future of care delivery.