Massive change is sweeping across the U.S. healthcare system, and healthcare leaders are working overtime to help their organizations meet the requirements of meaningful use and fulfill the mandates for health system reform under the Affordable Care Act, and to make the required transition to the ICD-10 coding system.
But beyond the immediate program requirements that are compelling providers forward, the public and private purchasers and payers of healthcare have been making it clearer and clearer that what they want to see from providers is a more transparent, higher-quality, higher-patient-safety, more efficient, more cost-effective, better-connected healthcare system, one with care management and population health management embedded into its operations, and one that offers consumers accountable care in the broadest sense of the term—in other words, what we at Healthcare Informatics have been calling the new healthcare.
And it is deeply encouraging to be able to share with our readers the stories of so many healthcare leaders who are helping lead their organizations forward towards that new healthcare, through their strategic leveraging of the tools of automation to improve both the clinical and business sides of their operations.
In that context, it has been profoundly satisfying for us in the past several years to be able to showcase innovations through the Healthcare Informatics Innovator Awards Program, which for many years honored individual innovators in healthcare IT, but which we at HCI reengineered several years ago in order to honor teams of innovative healthcare leaders. For the past five years, the Innovator Awards Program has been recognizing teams at the Detroit Medical Center, Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, Children’s Hospital and Medical Center (Omaha), NorthShore University HealthSystem, and other organizations, that have been showing their peers the way to the new healthcare.
We’ve just reopened the process, which will culminate in the top three teams being interviewed by members of the HCI editorial team, and being featured in the February 2014 issue of HCI, and being recognized at our Innovator Awards reception, to be held Feb. 24 in Orlando, during the 2014 HIMSS Conference, during that month.
So—if you and your colleagues have taken a team approach to any kind of substantive, IT-leveraged innovation, whether clinical or non-clinical in nature, and related to any kind of progress in healthcare, in a hospital, medical group, health system, health information exchange, etc.—please consider creating a submission to our program. (And please, no submissions from vendor companies, thank you!)
Because it is only through the regular sharing of stories, of narratives, and experiences, that everyone can learn from each other and thus all can move forward towards the opportunities, and the rigors, of the new healthcare. And we, the editors of Healthcare Informatics, are very privileged to be able to operate the exchange of ideas, insights, and perspectives that is a publication, and to therefore be able to play our small part in the enormous enterprise that is the transformation of healthcare.
So if you’ve got a story to tell, please join in and submit an entry to the Healthcare Informatics Innovator Awards Program. Your story could be one of those showcased in February—online, in print, and in person. Good luck, and may the most innovative teams win!
