In this session, attendees will hear from a healthcare system senior executive about his vision for the future information needs of healthcare providers. The speaker will share a clinician’s perspective on the challenges and imperatives we must embrace to harness the potential of healthcare information technology for the benefit of all patients.

Objectives:
• Define the principals of a 21st century system of electronic healthcare
• Discuss privacy and patient safety issues
• Provide a forum to discuss this initiative with the attendees

Guided by HIPAA, the deployment of clinical information systems requires very specific adherence to rules concerning privacy and security. In addition, both quality and patient safety are tied to the level of security of these systems. Unauthorized access and manipulation of critical systems could cause serious disruption of care and put many patients at risk. Yet, systems that are rigid and inflexible prevent rather than facilitate the teamwork among all caregivers necessary to take care of patients. In this session attendees will hear from a chief information officer and security officer as they discuss the challenges of balancing privacy and security with the nature of clinical workflow.

Objectives:
• Review the basic requirements of security and privacy for IT systems
• Understand the unique risks the collaborative clinical environment poses to security and privacy
• Explore the challenges of deploying clinically useful but secure clinical IT systems and potential solutions

The Federal Government is promoting and encouraging the development of the National Health Information Infrastructure (NHII) to provide anytime, anywhere health care information and decision support to prevent medical errors, improve quality, and reduce costs. NHII includes both inpatient and outpatient electronic health record systems and community health information exchanges that allow all the information for a given patient to be collected from multiple sources and delivered to any site of care. In this session, the leader of the NHII effort will present its vision and implementation strategy.

Objectives:
• Understand the need for a National Health Information Infrastructure (NHII) to enhance patient safety, improve quality of care, and increase efficiency
• Understand the key roles of both community health information exchanges and electronic health records in NHII
• Identify the key benefits of NHII and the challenges in accelerating its development
• Gain a better understanding of what the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is doing to promote and encourage NHII implementation
• Be aware of opportunities for local and national participation in NHII activities

Quality and patient safety in healthcare are a function of both care delivery processes and the technology supporting them. Information technology promises to greatly impact the occurrence of medical errors. This session will focus on various approaches that leverage IT within processes to maximize beneficial outcomes.

Objectives
• Review processes and their role in delivering quality patient care
• Understand how clinical information technology can enhance processes
• Explore the role care team collaboration has in processes and outcomes
• Review several case studies of enhanced processes made possible by clinical information technology.

Understand the FHA methodology and priorities of developing an architecture for the Federal Health Line of business through collaboration with representatives from federal, state and local governments and organizations within the health community.

Objectives:
• Recognize how the FHA and FEA are related
• Describe the FHA collaborative process and scope
• Examine the FHA develop methodology and priorities
• Recognize the current status on “verticals” in the FHA
• Interpret benefits resulting from a published FHA

Although much has been made of the potential impact of information technology on patient safety, existing realities concerning risk management and medical malpractice place some doubt on whether these technologies can truly be effectively deployed. Non-alignment of stakeholder incentives is often cited as a significant barrier to success. In this session, attendees will hear from a leading expert in health care law on what is needed to allow IT solutions to flourish and bring about true enhancement in patient safety.

An insurance executive and physician representative who will, in a panel session, deliver their views of the proposed legal restructuring will join the speaker.

As long as humans are involved in delivering health care, the design of the system in which they function will greatly impact outcomes. Human factors engineering research, an area of study that looks at the impact of design of systems and technologies on human performance, has significantly improved the safety of everything from airplanes to automobiles to cooking stoves.

In this session attendees will hear from both an expert in human factors engineering and a physician-leader in IT, and learn how attention to human factors engineering enhances the impact of healthcare IT implementation on quality of care delivered to patients.

Objectives:
• Review human factors engineering and its application in healthcare and patient safety
• Understand the human and organizational issues of healthcare information technology implementation
• Discuss the methods and tools that can facilitate the implementation of information technology in healthcare

Million dollar clinical information systems offer huge benefits in patient safety, quality of care and efficiency. Yet, few organizations have successfully implemented such systems effectively to deliver those benefits. On the contrary, recent reports have recorded more failures than successes. In this session attendees will hear from three executives with different backgrounds and responsibilities on the prospects of effectively implementing clinical information systems.

Objectives:
• Review the obstacles to adoption of clinical IT by clinicians
• Identify the risks associated with clinical IT deployment
• Explore potential approaches to successfully implement clinical IT