Translating Accountable Care Goals Into IT Action Items

Guidance on strategies, systems, priorities, and pitfalls for hospital CIOs

By Daniel J. Marino

The push for accountable care has created a new vocabulary for healthcare leaders: Clinical integration, longitudinal records, ambulatory networks, patient registries, care protocols, and more. Many hospital CIOs are uncertain how to piece it all together, and they are having trouble pinning down the IT requirements for making accountable care a reality.

The solution is to break the problem down into functional objectives and concrete steps. Following is a quick guide to translating the goals of accountable care into specific action items for CIOs.