The Prognosis
Chapter 16 Bedside Questions · 9 questions · about 9 minutes
Four conditions are arriving on a schedule the industry does not control (value-based payment, AI multiplying faster than governance, a shrinking clinical workforce, and the interoperable record finally arriving), and every one is met or failed by the informatics function. The rate-limiting step is people: the fellowship produces about 50 a year, so most organizations hold the Name without the Form and Function.
Giving a prognosis to a patient with weakened heart muscle: a range rather than a point, the modifiable factors named apart from the fixed ones, and honesty the patient can plan against over a long course.
Answer as your executive team would, with the evidence in hand. Each question has a factual answer in a system you already own.
Have you characterized and budgeted the value-based capabilities you need at your next major contract renewal, or are you planning to build them during the contract?
Add a note: where is the evidence, or who owns it?
Is your governance sized to the number of AI models you will run in 3 years, or the number you run now?
Add a note: where is the evidence, or who owns it?
Is workforce strategy reconciled with technology strategy at the executive level, in the same room, with the same people?
Add a note: where is the evidence, or who owns it?
Are interoperability and population health capabilities designed for the cross-organizational future or the within-organizational past?
Add a note: where is the evidence, or who owns it?
Who is your informatics succession plan? If the person in that seat left in 90 days, what would you do, checked against a national graduating class of around 50?
Add a note: where is the evidence, or who owns it?
Are you developing the physician already in the seat, or waiting to recruit a finished one? If waiting, how long has the search been open and what is the plan for the year after it fails?
Add a note: where is the evidence, or who owns it?
If your search already failed once, which of the five arrangements did you evaluate before concluding you could not have this function?
Add a note: where is the evidence, or who owns it?
Is your residency and training partnership designed for the physician role that is arriving, or the one that existed when it was written?
Add a note: where is the evidence, or who owns it?
When the board asks what the next 5 years require, can your local team give a coherent answer without a vendor in the room?
Add a note: where is the evidence, or who owns it?
A reflection tool from the book, not a validated diagnostic test or benchmark. Your answers and notes stay in this browser unless you choose to send them. Please don't enter patient information.
A vacancy is at least named honestly. A wrong appointment is sometimes just a vacancy in disguise.
The Diagnostician, Chapter 16