Mary Stevens, Editor

Healthcare practitioners have a paradoxical reputation as both adept technology users and hidebound technology resisters. We found plenty of the former during our call for entries for the first CMIO Health IT Innovation Awards, which isn’t surprising. However, the variety of projects and the technologies enlisted were definitely remarkable. The competition garnered nominees that were simple in their elegance and others that detailed comprehensive integrations. They enlisted business intelligence and analytics tools, clinical decision support, dashboards, service-level agreements, server virtualization and cloud-based initiatives. It’s been said that healthcare is years behind when it comes to innovation. This is not the case at the facilities that sent us their best evidence of cutting-edge IT use.

It is clear that clinicians at these facilities have improved the care they deliver to patients based on these projects, and as a whole, this bodes well for those who believe more and better use of IT is the best and fastest way to improve healthcare in this country.

Personal health records figured into several of the entries we received, and elsewhere in this issue, Gina Narcisi takes a look at PHRs in organizations where clinicians and patients alike are putting them to good use. They can’t come soon enough as far as I’m concerned. Twice this year I’ve been told by my practitioners “we need to update our medical records.” In both instances, that meant I had to fill out a 100-question paper form—again. As patients, we’re ostensibly the experts in our own care, but I couldn’t answer some of the questions beyond vague recollections. And my data likely will reside on those sheets of paper, no good to anyone. Coupled with an effective EMR, a PHR would help provide an accurate, comprehensive medical history—more accurate than my cranial storage unit, anyway.

Providing patients with timely access to their information is one of the meaningful use requirements of electronic records, and PHR adoption is spreading, if slowly. I hope those questionnaires are the last paper ones I have to fill out, and that someday I can enter my information electronically—just once—on my own record, and correct it if necessary. Until then, the paper record and my cranial storage unit will have to do.