Office of the Chief Medical Information Officer

The Office of the Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO) sets and directs strategy for a wide range of health information initiatives across Penn Medicine. 

The Office of the CMIO is fundamental to supporting core priorities of the health system. These include:

• achieving more seamless system integration
• promoting consistent standards across the institution — the “Penn Way” of care
• proactively managing groups of patients
• identifying opportunities to reduce unnecessary variation in the way information is collected and displayed
• leading innovative solutions in applied health informatics to meet ongoing and emerging health care challenges. 

The CMIO team has a long tradition of collaborating with groups in the health system to build consensus, solve problems, and drive decision making about medical information in the organization. Fundamentally, the CMIO team leads change in the primary currency of clinical care: the health information on which all clinicians and patients depend. 

CMIO Collaboration and Health Informatics
 

The CMIO team frequently collaborates with key health system groups such as Information Services (IS), Electronic Health Record (EHR) Transformation, and the Center for Evidence Based Practice (CEP) , among many others.

The CMIO team has also sought to align efforts with groups doing similar work at Penn Medicine. A collaboration with the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit (a subsidiary of the Center for Health Care Innovation), and the Division of Infectious Diseases initiated automatic screening of patients for Hepatitis C at hospital admission and proactively linked patients who screened positive to a dedicated outpatient treatment program. While full results are pending, the program improved the rate of Hepatitis C screening of patients and reduced clinician workload by eliminating a Hepatitis C screening alert that had often fired to clinicians at the wrong time and therefore been ignored, leading to many missed opportunities for Hepatitis C screening.

CMIO team members are leaders in applied health informatics: they include several fellows of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and one fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. CMIO members have been part of major clinical informatics initiatives such as a National Academy of Medicine meeting to develop a national strategy for clinical decision support, a health care innovation summit about the role of the CMIO, and an ECRI workgroup dedicated to developing safe practices to reduce electronic health record alert fatigue. 

The CMIO team and other groups in the Center for Applied Health Informatics will be instrumental in advancing health system readiness to meet the medical information needs of today and those of the future. 

This highly coordinated applied health informatics work is a significant element of Penn Medicine’s journey to becoming a high reliability organization. Having data from multiple sources that can be summarized, presented, and understood in real time will allow the health system to identify and respond nimbly to potential hazards, taking corrective action before a serious problem ever develops. 

Such real-time information will facilitate Penn Medicine’s ability to learn about itself and continuously improve in ways that were never possible in the past. By anticipating future medical information needs, the CMIO office and its partners in the Center can help assure Penn Medicine’s position of strength for the future.