We love the prospect of a new year ahead - 365 new days. It's just a calendar, of course, a tool for ordering days, setting meetings, making appointments and remembering birthdays. But as we move from the last day of one year to the first day of the next, our Outlook and Google calendars seem so much more than a way to schedule yet more tasks, more appointments, more projects and more deadlines.
A new year presents potential for a fresh start, for new ideas, for innovation, for revamping, or plenty of tweaking.
We are just back from two health IT events - the mHealth Summit and the Healthcare IT News/HIMSS Media Privacy & Security Forum, both high energy events, where the resolve for making health IT be the best catalyst it can be to create a new approach to patient care, was palpable.
At the mHealth Summit, we met Katy Fike and Stephen Johnston from Aging 2.0, an organization dedicated to finding new ways to address the healthcare needs of an aging population.
"I love trying to be that bridge between really understanding what's changing for older adults, what's going on in their bodies and minds and families and communities and trying to convey those needs to businesses and help them create better solutions." Fike told us.
We caught up with Joseph Kvedar, MD, founder of the Center for Connected Health, part of Partners HealthCare in Boston. Long before mHealth became part of the healthcare IT vernacular, Kvedar was at work connecting people with diabetes and other chronic conditions to monitors that helped manage their disease. Not one to rest on his laurels, he and his team are developing a new initiative called Wellocracy (see Kvedar's commentary below).
At the Healthcare IT News/HIMSS Media Privacy & Security Forum last month Tim Zoph, CIO of Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, called on attendees to raise the bar on privacy and security change at their own organizations. Nothing short of a culture change would do, he asserted.
We spoke with Leon Rodriquez, director of the Office of Civil Rights, which is charged with enforcing the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rule. To push healthcare into the digital age, "there has to be bedrock patient trust," he told us. As he sees it, enforcement has to be assertive, yet balanced with education.
Fike, Johnson, Kvedar, Zoph and Rodriguez are a tiny fraction of the thousands upon thousands of individuals making a huge difference in the healthcare IT industry today. Some leaders have been at work for many years, while others are emerging as leaders. Associate Editor Erin McCann profiles a few 'up and comers' (Page 6).
In the spirit of a new year, Healthcare IT News editors asked policymakers, vendors and CIOs (Page 4) what they wanted to see done on the healthcare IT front in 2013. There are many hopes and dreams, needs and wants: EHRs that work, better technology all around, national patient identifiers, patients who are engaged in their own care, tight security for patient data, interoperability, a smooth transition to ICD-10 are just a few.
The industry leaders we talked with would not be content with merely dropping coins in a fountain or wishing upon a star for what they want: Each and every day they work to make their vision of improved patient care a reality. They are innovating even as they keep shoulders to the wheel. No one we know is on standby.
Some told us they long for productivity and cooperation. Others waxed eloquent about clarity, patience and wisdom. Yes, let's go for those elusive goals in 2013. They help keep everything in perspective, and somehow everything else begins to fall into place - even the transformation of a $2.6 trillion, unwieldy healthcare system into one that provides top-notch care in an elegant, efficient way.
