Chief Information and Technology Officers in Healthcare Essay

CIO and CTO: Fundamental Responsibilities and Key Characteristics

In healthcare, the Chief Information Officer, or the CIO, supervises the work of the IT department. Additionally, the company CIO addresses the issues related to the technology purchasing decisions, as well as the needs related to technology that the staff members may have. Planning and enhancement of the communication processes between the members of the IT department is another role of the company CIO. For instance, choosing the information collected with the help of IT devices from the patient so that the treatment strategy could be defined is one of the possible tasks that a CIO may need to accomplish in the healthcare setting.

The Chief Technology Officer (CTO), in their turn, is preoccupied with designing the corporate policies related to the use of the corresponding diagnostic and treatment technology. Although the CTO may also perform the functions similar to those of the CIO, such as the supervision processes, these are the business-related opportunities and risks rather than the patient-related ones that a CTO manages. For example, in the context of a healthcare service, a CTO may monitor the trends in the contemporary healthcare technology area so that the company could deploy updated techniques and use up-to-date equipment to tend to the patients’ needs.

Although there is a very fine line between a CTO and a CIO, they tend to focus on different areas of the company’s operations. Furthermore, each addresses the needs of the company’s stakeholders from a different perspective (a healthcare one vs. a technological one). However, at the end of the day, both strive to increase customer satisfaction rates.

Recommendations for CIO and CTO: Increasing Patient Satisfaction

The focus on the interoperability of the company’s departments is the most valuable advice that one can give a CIO. While being seemingly self-explanatory, the significance of informational connectivity between the departments of a healthcare service often slips the managers’ minds. As a result, the pace of the company’s operations is slackened down significantly, and the threats of data misinterpretation emerge. The inter-system sharing of the patient’s records, in its turn, is bound to help reduce the number of mistakes to zero, making a range of healthcare processes such as bedside handover simpler and faster. Therefore, enhancing and improving the communication processes occurring in the healthcare organization should be viewed as the primary focus of the CIO. To attain the identified goal, one should consider the specifics of organizational behavior and interpersonal communication in the facility; unless appropriate communication, negotiation, decision-making, and conflict management techniques are utilized in the process, the information management is going to be flawed.

For the CTO, it might be a reasonable thing to be very honest and clear about the technology strategy to the essential company stakeholders, including not only patients but also the investors and the employees. Although including the latter in the list of the people that need to be informed about the corporate technological strategies might seem an obvious choice, it is often overlooked The consequences of the negligence are dire – without a proper understanding of the course that the firm is taking with its IT framework, the employees may misinterpret their roles and responsibilities, therefore, leading to a drop in the healthcare services. The patients, in their turn, also have to be aware of the technological advances that the company has to offer.

Improving Healthcare Processes and Increasing Quality Levels: Tools

Project Roadmap: Key Milestones

Using the project roadmap is the first step toward enhancing the efficacy of healthcare services as the tool in question helps get the priorities straight. Defining the key milestones of a specific process, it introduces order to the relevant processes, helping attain the corresponding goals in an efficient an expeditious manner. The roadmap functions as the tool for assigning healthcare service members roles and responsibilities based on the current priorities of the organization.

Apart from determining the milestones of a specific healthcare process or a project, a roadmap sets the quality indicators that permit an accurate measurement of the personnel’s performance. As a result, the evaluation of the changes in the services quality becomes a possibility.

Finally and, perhaps, most importantly, the project roadmap tool sets premises for a culture change in the context of an organization. In other words, it becomes the impetus for enhancing diversity and convincing the employees to adopt a patient-centered approach in order to cater to the unique needs of the target population (Ulltveit-Moe, 2014).

(i)Six Sigma Model: Quality Assurance

The principles of (i)Six Sigma suggested by Pyzdek and implying the promotion of a consistent quality improvement (Pyzdek & Keller, 2014) are viewed as an indispensable part of the contemporary business processes management in not only healthcare organizations but entrepreneurship, in general. Offering the DMAIC and DMADV frameworks as the foundation for implementing change, the tool serves as the means of promoting change on all levels of the company’s operations. Furthermore, the philosophy of Six Sigma implies that the employees’ attitude toward the idea of service quality should be altered together with the change in the firm’s operations. As a result, the staff members become geared toward a consistent quality improvement.

Data Privacy and Proper Use of Information: What Can Be Improved

Security Gap Analysis: Detecting the Loopholes

The very title of the strategy is quite self-explanatory; the process of data privacy enhancement is carried out by detecting the dents in the current framework and considering the ways of managing the located issues. The array of issues that the specified strategy embraces can be viewed as both the advantage of the approach and its problem. By conducting the gap analysis, one will be able to consider the human factor, the problems with the current organizational behavior model, the issues in the IT environment, etc. However, the analysis will take an impressive amount of time which the company may not have. Furthermore, the necessity to envelop a wide range of areas, such as the OB issues, the IT problems, etc., may have a negative effect on the accuracy of the analysis results (Tse, Schrader, Ghosh, Liao, & Lundie, 2015).

Investing in Information Management Systems

Representing a rather long-term approach, the idea of investing in the development of the future IMS is, in fact, quite sensible. By promoting the IT progress, organizations build the premises for the further enhancement of their IT security and the safety of the corporate data. The outcomes of the IT-related research and the findings thereof may become the basis for creating the IT strategies that will prevent companies from data leakage. Moreover, by developing information systems, firms enable their staff members to grasp the significance of proper information management; as a result, the employees do not make the mistakes that lead to an increase in data vulnerability (Rao, & Gilbertson, 2016).

Training Providers in Using Technology in Healthcare

Recreating the environment in which healthcare providers are most likely to operate when using their IT skills is the most important element of designing high-quality training. Herein lies the significance of simulations as the principal tool for training providers to use the corresponding information technology appropriately. By choosing a simulation as the essential training tool, one is likely to help healthcare providers get ready for the scenarios that they are most likely to face in reality.

It would be wrong to assume that creating patterns for addressing all possible scenarios is the key reason for applying simulations as the training tool. Instead, the identified approach is supposed to help healthcare providers develop critical thinking and resourcefulness required to manage unexpected problems and find original solutions to unique dilemmas that they may face in the context of the target environment. As a result, healthcare experts will have an opportunity to gain flexibility required to address a range of problems and be very creative in locating the solutions to the emergent issues.

Moreover, simulations can be viewed as a perfect means of training the necessary skills in a safe environment. Thus, the participants of the training process may control the process and focus on the issues that cause them the greatest concern. Pausing the training at the points where sensibility is required and speeding it up at the stages that have been drilled well enough allows the participants to work on the aspects that they need to.

Finally, the opportunities for saving some of the financial resources that simulations provide need to be brought up among the definitive reasons for choosing the approach in question. Using creativity, one will be able to design the necessary setting using the minimum of financial resources; as a result, the costs of the training are reduced significantly.

Effective IT Alignment and Strategic Planning Initiatives

BPM COT and IT Processes: Strategic Modeling

Designed specifically to align the essential IT processes with the ones that are related to business, BPM COT is the framework that allows creating a very lifelike simulation. By using the identified software, one is likely to design the model that represents the corporate processes in a very detailed and accurate manner. As a result, the IT elements can be aligned with the corporate ones in a manner as efficient as possible (Aligning IT to the strategic plan, 2013).

Goal Models as the Means of Aligning IT and Business Processes

The concept known as goal models may also serve the purpose of aligning the IT elements and the essential business processes. First, it assigns each member of the organization a particular role that they are supposed to follow, the IT Department being viewed as the implementer of the strategy designed by the Operations Manager in the case in point (Baïna, Ansias, Petit, & Castiaux, 2008). Therefore, whereas the business strategy is interpreted as a driver in the identified philosophy, the IT strategy is considered to be the factor that contributes to the enhancement of the business strategy success.

IT Governance and Its Effects on the Process of IT Alignment

The promotion of IT governance in the company can be viewed as another tool for aligning the IT processes and the ones related to the company’s operations management. By definition, the subject matter is the part and parcel of the enterprise governance, which incorporates a specific leadership strategy and a design of the organizational structure and processes. As a result of the approach mentioned above, CIOs become capable of using the principle of value delivery as the link between the operational management processes and the IT issues.

Reference List

Aligning IT to the strategic plan. (2013). Web.

Baïna, S., Ansias, P. Y., Petit, M., & Castiaux, A. (2008). Strategic business/IT alignment using goal models. Web.

Pyzdek T., & Keller, P. (2014). The Six Sigma handbook (2nd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Rao, L. K. F., & Gilbertson, J. R. (2016). Longitudinal engagement of pathology residents: A proposed approach for informatics training. American Journal of Clinical Pathology, 142(6), 748-754.

Tse, J., Schrader, D. E., Ghosh, D., Liao, T., & Lundie, D. (2015). A bibliometric analysis of privacy and ethics in IEEE security and privacy. Ethics and Information Technology, 17(2), 153-163.

Ulltveit-Moe, N. (2014). A roadmap towards improving managed security services from a privacy perspective. Ethics and Information Technology, 16(3), 227-240.