By Aine Cryts
Roni Amiel, CIO & Chief Information Security Officer, Blythedale Children’s Hospital
Being successful with interoperability in healthcare is about people, technology, and process, says Roni Amiel, CIO and chief information security officer at Blythedale Children’s Hospital in Valhalla, NY. Amiel’s advice for CIOs who want to achieve interoperability is to forge relationships with the chief medical officer and the chief nursing officer. “Along with the CIO, these are the people who can make things happen,” he says.
AXIS recently spoke with Amiel about best practices for interoperability within healthcare.
AXIS: Why does interoperability matter in healthcare?
Amiel: Interoperability is really about using technology to impact patient care and outcomes and quality of care. That’s at the heart of what we do.
Interoperability enables clinicians to understand the patient before care—and that’s a key aspect of developing a care plan for any patient. In many hospitals, they fax or e-mail information. There’s no way of translating that data. With the evolution of electronic information, there’s an enormous amount of data collected about any patient. Interoperability also involves thinking about how to leverage technology in a smart way and sharing that information with the patient, from the time they’re born to as far as you can take it.
AXIS: What response have you received from clinicians about data sharing and interoperability?
Amiel: Clinicians here welcome the opportunity to use patient data. Ask any clinician, regardless of their role in the clinical world; they spend a good amount of time chasing clinical information about patients. They welcome the opportunity to be served this information at the click of a button. The challenge is building awareness among clinicians that interoperability is good for them and will help them do their job better, smarter, faster.
AXIS: When it comes to achieving interoperability, what best practices can you share?
Amiel: It’s about technology, people, and process. When you start to create these building blocks, you’re likely to think about collaborative, unified, less-siloed healthcare environments. What we really focus on is the people side of things. My advice for CIOs is to forge relationships among the chief medical officer and the chief nursing officer. Along with the CIO, these are the people who can make things happen. If they have the right goals in mind, they can certainly shake things up.
At the next level is the focus on process. Make sure that the process is really what it should be. Don’t build solutions on a broken process because then the technology is broken as well. But by the time you get to the technology, if you’re able to forge the right relationships, get the buy-in, get teams to collaborate and think about out-of-the-box solutions—like how to deliver care to patients in a much more efficient way that will drive better outcomes—a process like that can really make the job of providing technology solutions very easy.
We see this at Blythedale day in and day out. We have over 200 different tools that we have developed over the years, outside of the EMR. The EMR is the single repository of information, but we’ve supplemented what the EMR doesn’t offer by utilizing different solutions that meet the need.
It’s about asking the right questions: Are we doing the right thing by the patient? Are we doing it the right way in terms of cost?
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About Roni Amiel:
Roni Amiel is CIO and chief information security officer at Blythedale Children’s Hospital, a specialty children’s hospital. Previously, he was the CIO/CISO for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York’s Department of Health.
Amiel has been elected by Becker’s Hospital Review to be in the Top 100 CIOs and other executive-level information technology leaders from hospitals and health systems across the country. He holds degrees from and has completed academic programs at New York University and Colorado Technical University.
