HIMSS: Hospital CIO's Should Not Only Manage Healthcare IT, But Also Biomedical Engineering

I have written in the past about the territoriality of the IT department in hospitals, observing that the departments I was exposed to seemed more political than the clinical departments themselves. This territoriality came at the expense of clinicians' and patients' best interests.

This phenomenon seems to go beyond the confines of the hospital IT shop, perhaps as a manifestation of the IT culture. For example:

Other have observed - unapprovingly so - how the health IT trade group HIMSS, via a massive lobbying effort and via its offspring, the CCHIT, has sought to gain hegemony over health IT through a "certification" process, a service for which CCHIT desires to be the sole provider.

It's become worse. Now control over biomedical instrumentation (which includes such safety critical devices as ventilators, cardiac and other physiologic monitors, heart-lung machines, radiological devices, etc.) is sought.

In the June 2009 HIMSS analytics report "Devices in Hospitals" (link to PDF):

Page 7:

... It appears that the IS department [a.k.a. IT department, or Management Information Systems department - ed.] is becoming the key support department for interfaced intelligent medical devices. This is a natural extension as IS departments build and support a cadre of interfaces to improve the collection and use of data within the hospital.

Then at the end of the report, in the Conclusion, a leap of logic of gargantuan proportions:

What is less clear at this time is whether the biomedical operations will be placed under the IS department for management. We believe that it should be , ala the movement of responsibility for telecommunications to the CIO when telecommunications and information technologies merged in the last 15 years .

Au contraire ... it is very clear to those who know what they're doing that this is a very bad analogy and suggests HIMSS does not understand the vast differences between the discipline and functions of biomedical engineering, versus the IT department role of management of computer and other ICT's (information and communications technologies). I find this astonishing.

Having done a clerkship in biomedical engineering in medical school, and being somewhat knowledgeable about electronics as an FCC-licensed radio amateur at the Extra class (highest certification attainable by a series of FCC examinations), I find the HIMSS Analytics position risible and dangerous. It suggests a desire to expand territory even further into an area for which CIO's and hospital IT personnel are even less qualified - indeed, far less qualified - than clinical IT.

Apparently, CCHIT wants to have hegemony over "certification" of clinical IT, and the parent organization HIMSS through its research arm opines IT should also take over "medical devices" (while still excluding clinical IT from that categorization to avoid regulation, of course).

As I first asked over ten years ago after observing IT personnel in hospitals :

Who, exactly, are the IT personnel in hospitals, and what, exactly, in their backgrounds qualifies them for major involvement in clinical affairs, let alone leadership roles regarding safety-critical clinical devices?

Perhaps the Joint Commission, FDA, and other regulators need to start asking the same question.

-- SS