Chief Medical Informatics Officer [CMIO]

Chief Medical Informatics Officer [CMIO] is required by hospitals to complement the CIO for EHR implementation and to build the strategic IT Roadmap to support business growth. Usually the CIO comes from a non-Healthcare background and has a steep learning curve about the hospital's dynamic workflows. Whereas the CMIO should come with unique set of cross-over skills that forms a bridge between Physicians, IT and Business.


I see this as a big gap in the current hospital setup everywhere. As the Healthcare-IT product implementations increase the CMIO role will become more critical. The era of developing an HIS/EMR Application for hospitals is over. Now its all about configuring, implementing and adapting pre-developed HIS, EHR or HIE products.

mHealth and 3G are the next big wave

3G is a game changing and disruptive technology. The problem of bandwidth, penetration and access will be solved. You can run voice, text, large images, video and other media file on the 3G network. Telemedicine will get a boost. Doctors will use more 3G Mobile platforms for remote access to EMR. Big size Radiology images can be seen remotely. Patients can be hooked to EMR for remote monitoring. 3G will become another viable option for the cloud computing. I can keep counting the possibilities...

However in terms of cost the Telecom providers have to plan for reducing entery barriers, exit barriers, provide instant gratification.

Insurance, Cash-less Transactions, Standards

The recent issue in the press about Insurance refusing to honor cash-less transactions has caused a lot of heart burn. The major reason for this deadlock is due to lack of standards in Indian Healthcare industry. To be fair obviously the insurance company wants an audit trails of what, why and when something was done to the patient and the charges applied. However the way we practice medicine, there is no incentive or reprimand for keeping or not keeping medical records respectively.

The issue is of transparency. Friction with insurance can be reduced if the Signs, Symptoms and Diagnosis is recorded as per ICD and Procedures are recorded as per CPT and the Billing Master is mapped to the CPT codes. This how it is done world over, so why not in India. Obviously our medical colleges forgot to teach a us a lot of things!

mHealth: Mobile platform and EMR for Chronic Disease Mgmt

I have been away for very long now. However here I am back with a white paper for you all to read. My white paper highlighting CRM concepts in Chronic Disease Management was published on DPS website. Plz click the Title of this post to be redirected to the white paper on DPS website.

Technology such as EHR, Mobile Phones, and Social Networking can be combined to manage chronic disease and a promote wellness.

I wrote this paper with Dr Alka Singh, a Public Health specialist.