The role of the healthcare CIO, CIO, or IT Vice President is traditionally one of executive leadership involving technical savvy, business acumen, and organizational management skills.  As information technology began playing increasingly important roles in the healthcare organization, technical managers began taking on increasingly visible leadership roles in the organization.  While technically competent, these specialists often had little credibility with clinicians and minimal understanding of how information technology impacts the organization's business processes.  To remedy this problem, information technology leaders have increasingly developed a business understanding, have built bridges to the clinician community, and political savvy to maneuver around the executive suite.

Simultaneously over the past twenty years the medical informatics, now the health informatics discipline, emerged as a specialty within the practitioner community.  The health informatics discipline began with practitioners who understood the promise that information technology presented and were disappointed at the absence of benefit that current application of that technology had on their work patterns and patient benefit.  As we enter this new century, we are seeing the practices of the IT leaders and those of health informaticists increasingly well defined and in some cases drawing closer together.  Where the health informaticist is now often the champion of technology for clinician and patient benefit, the CIO or IT Vice President is, in reality, the grand IT architect of the organization.  Whatever their title, the IT executive holds the strategic vision of how technology can benefit patients, clinicians, and business, and is responsible for its definition and implementation. 

Because information technology often becomes a make-or-break issue in the success and prosperity of the healthcare organization the IT executive needs to understand how technology can enable change, how to skillfully present the possible changes to the various stakeholders in the healthcare organization, and how to create the architectural framework to plan and achieve these changes.  Managing the dimensions of change this architecture are as key and essential to the development of modern healthcare information systems as traditional considerations like life cycle management.  This architecture focuses on envisioning and describing the desired outcome and creating a plan that will allow IT specialists to achieve this outcome. 

This site can help guide technical and non-technical executives, staff and managers at all levels of the organization to understand the importance of IT architecture and the impact this architecture has on the business of healthcare, the clinician's delivery of care services, and the benefits that patients receive from those services.  This site presents both a strategic view for the executive and tactical information for managers and IT specialists, those architectural best practices such as used in the planning, design and development of clinical data repositories and data warehouses.  This site also provides a variety of research and white papers for clients, and hosts a User Group for licensees of the ANSI 1000 Specification for a Standard Clinical Data Architecture.