Reporting live this week from the MGMA Annual Conference in San Antonio, Texas, it’s been fascinating and exciting to hear stories of medical groups nationwide whose leaders are leading the way to the new healthcare. Just as hospital and health system leaders have been doing, healthcare leaders in truly pioneering medical groups are figuring out how to do exactly what the policy-makers, purchasers, payers, and consumers of healthcare are demanding: make healthcare more accountable, transparent, higher in quality and patient safety, efficient, cost-effective, and patient- and community-satisfying.
It’s no mean feat, but what is very inspiring is the tremendous diversity of achievements being created by medical group, hospital, integrated health system, and health information exchange leaders nationwide. Whether it involves creating new processes to improve patient safety, creating information systems that continuously promote and measure performance improvement, or any of a tremendous diversity of initiatives, CIOs, CMIOs, CEOs, COOs, CMOs, CFOs, and their colleagues bearing every type of professional title imaginable, are showing the way to the healthcare of the future, now.
On the medical group side, two medical groups so far have been finalist organizations in the Healthcare Informatics Innovator Awards program: Southeast Texas Medical Associates (SETMA), in Beaumont Texas, which was the second-place winning organization in 2011; and the Marshfield Clinic, in Wausau, Wisconsin, in 2012. James L. “Larry” Holly has been leading a truly amazing ongoing initiative at SETMA, which has developed groundbreaking templates that have been helping the group’s physicians to optimize their disease management efforts, and build an award-winning patient-centered medical home model.
Meanwhile, the leaders at Marshfield Clinic have leveraged a self-developed population health management dashboard application to provide the group’s doctors and certified nurse specialists improve care coordination in real time, leading them to tie for third place in our program in 2012.
These innovations at SETMA and the Marshfield Clinic are just two examples among many, in which healthcare pioneers have been leading healthcare forward by example.
And they are also, of course, perfect examples of exactly why we at Healthcare Informatics are once again sponsoring our Innovator Awards program—precisely to honor and recognize the true pioneers in healthcare, and to share their success stories in order to inspire others to follow their example.
Have you got a team or teams within your organization that are pushing the boundaries towards the new healthcare? Your organization could receive well-deserved recognition for its innovative efforts. Just let us know, by submitting this online form to us. Please keep in mind, vendors are prohibited from submitting to this program, either on their own behalf or that of a client. But for provider and other healthcare organizations, the sky’s the limit. Let us know about what you’re doing to reshape healthcare in your world, and we might just be able to bring your story attention in the bigger world. There never has been a more exciting time to be involved in innovation in healthcare, and we at HCI are thrilled to play our role in supporting it going forward.
