Managing the new wave of handheld mobile devices flooding into patient care organizations is turning out to be a complex set of tasks indeed. For one thing, in contrast to past waves of computerization in healthcare, this time around, clinicians, especially physicians, are bringing their own devices-every kind of handheld mobile computing device coming out onto the market. This issue's cover story (pp. 8-14) examines the strategic, clinical preference, data security, and other issues facing CIOs and other IT leaders in this sometimes-bewildering emerging computing environment. Find out from CIOs, CMIOs, and industry experts what the innovator organizations are doing in this challenging, yet also exciting, area of clinical computing.
And what does it mean to make good use of secure text messaging as a channel for improving patient care management and patient-provider communications? Patient care organizations across the country are experimenting with all sorts of new approaches (pp. 21-23).
Meanwhile, one of the longest-standing, and most successful, health information exchanges, the Indiana Network for Patient Care, was established back in the mid-1990s as a proof-of-concept initiative to share data between two separate emergency departments in Indianapolis. Find out why that HIE has survived and thrived (pp. 32).
In addition, with the volumes of diagnostic images in patient care organizations growing by leaps and bounds, healthcare IT executives are finding innovative new ways to manage the imaging storage explosion (pp. 16-18).
Finally, what exactly is an EIO? Leaders at the large Penn Medicine health system in Philadelphia came to realize recently that they need a whole new group of individuals to help optimize IT operations across diverse facilities and entities within the multi-hospital, integrated system. Enter the entity information officer (pp. 28-29).
Healthcare Informatics 2010 August;27(8):4
