Executive Q&A
Forrester’s Top Health-IT Predictions for 2008.
By Cindy Atoji

Expect large institutions to make significant IT investments; RHIOs will still struggle with architecture and governance models; EMRs creep closer to reality, and health plans will continue to implement consumer-directed vendor partnerships.

So says Forrester health care analyst Eric Brown as he examines the industry landscape for the coming year. Digital HealthCare & Productivity spent some time talking with Brown, who launched Forrester’s health care practice in 1999 and now serves as research vice president.

DHP: Let’s start at the top. What does the health-IT spending picture look like for the coming year?

BROWN: If we look at large hospital and enterprises, we’re looking an average of 3.5 percent of their budget spent on IT, with some notable outliers in the 5-6 percent range. This includes investing in the usual suspects: electronic medical records, clinical information systems — PAC systems (Picture Archiving and Communications), CPOEs (Computerized Physician Order Entry), nursing station automation, pharmacy systems -- and in the middle there’s some sort of clinical data warehouse and analytics, the operational reporting that helps hospitals improve their administrative and clinical efforts. More...

Health Care CIOs are Well Paid

Chief information officers at health care provider organizations earn nearly as much as chief executives in terms of base salary, and more than any other non-clinical executive, according to a new survey.

In the 2008 health-IT salary survey from Healthcare Informatics magazine, the median annual base salary for CIOs was $125,000, equal to that of chief operating officers and slightly below the $135,000 for CEOs. Chief medical officers had a median salary of $202,500.

However, the mean salary for CIOs actually was slightly higher than that of CEOs, $142,690, compared to $142,600, excluding outliers.

Healthcare Informatics interviewed 238 “c-level” executives at various provider organizations nationwide in September, and a total of 1,125 people in all positions from a standing panel of magazine readers. — Neil Versel

IBM and Mayo Team to Bridge Gap in Medical Imaging
By Adam Stone

Mayo Clinic and IBM have expanded a 2006 collaboration with the creation of the Medical Imaging Informatics Innovation Center (MI3C) on the Mayo Clinic campus. The Center is using an image registration technology developed by Mayo and IBM that produces results 50 times faster than prior technologies. Each organization has devoted three researchers to direct investigations into medical imaging technologies, with the goal of eventually improving the quality of patient care.

“It’s difficult to take good ideas and produce products out of them. There is always this intermediate step of: Does that idea pan out in practice?” said Bradley Erickson, chair of Radiology Informatics at Mayo Clinic and a neuro-radiologist. More...

Deals, Deployments, and Short News
By Allison Proffitt, Digital HealthCare & Productivity staff

SOA workshop announced, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Montana partners with Benefitfocus, HP introduced medical image archiving. More...