CIO and/or CMIO role: Keep Patient's Away From the ER ?

There's been a lot of discussion about HCIT in this political season, and the topic of ER utilization and traffic has come up in different ways in these blogs. It's clearly one of the central indicators about the health and financial well being of the US health care system. That's got to be true at large hospitals and clinics as well?

A few weeks back, we covered "Average ER Waiting Time? Planning for the Future, the Long View"where we looked at the CDC data showing a trend toward longer waits and fewer ERs.

In today's WSJ, there was Scott Gottlieb's article, "Michelle Obama Is Right About Avoiding the ER" where the author, a practicing physician, walked through the economic, liability, and patient interest view of getting patients to local health clinics, instead of ERs.

Connecting the dots, do CIOs, CMIOs, and other CXOs have a larger, explicit role in wiring the care community?

Or, are the economic forces still too strongly driving traffic to the ERs?

How do you see this issue?