InformationWeek's Healthcare IT Leadership Forum Highlights Key Business Technology Trends and Innovations in the Healthcare Sector

NEW YORK, July 14, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- UBM TechWeb's InformationWeek released key insights from its 2011 Healthcare IT Leadership Forum, an event that brought together chief information officers and other technology leaders from major healthcare systems around the country on July 12 in New York City.

Speaking at the Forum, Dr. Neil Calman, founder and CEO of the Institute for Family Health and a member of ONC's Health IT Policy Committee, spoke of several healthcare IT megatrends;  among them: Healthcare providers will be forced to be much more accountable then they are now. And they will have to answer directly to the public. "Open access and public disclosure to outcome data.... Nothing forces us to improve what we do as when we have to show it to others."  

Dr. Calman joined several well-respected CIOs and clinicians, including Stephanie Reel from Johns Hopkins University and Hospitals, Bill Spooner from Sharp HealthCare, and Charles Lockwood, MD, from Yale School of Medicine, to discuss electronic health records, personalized medicine, and the role of social media in healthcare.

Debra Wolf, RN, PhD, informatics specialist and associate professor of nursing at Slippery Rock University, touched on the agony and ecstasy of working with EHRs and social media.  One important piece of advice she offered CIOs: "Social media frightens me to death...There is so much unreliable information on healthcare on the web, so we need to start meeting our patients out there in the online world, offering them secure sites with reliable information.  CIOs need to address this issue in their strategic plan."

InformationWeek Healthcare's Mobile Health Apps Smackdown, one of the highlights of the Forum, featured presentations from five finalists who were chosen from over 50 submissions.  The five finalists were: Bosch's Healthcare Health Buddy, WakeApp's DemoMap, AirStrip Technologies' AirStrip OB, Epocrates Essentials, and WellDoc's Diabetes Manager System, all of which InformationWeek judges deemed stellar. AirStrip Technologies' AirStrip OB app was named top app by InformationWeek judges.  

Paul Cerrato, Editor of InformationWeek Healthcare, congratulated AirStrip, saying: "I've been impressed with AirStrip OB even since I first saw a demo of it at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' annual meeting several years ago.  And when I did a deeper dive at our IT Forum, it was just as impressive. The app's virtual look at fetal monitoring data puts physicians 'in the room' like no other technology I've even seen before."

More than 150 healthcare IT professionals registered for the event.  For more information visit www.informationweek.com/healthcare or for technology marketing solutions and best practices, go to www.createyournextcustomer.com.  Follow InformationWeek on Twitter @InformationWeek, on LinkedIn, or on Facebook.

For more information, contact:
Winnie Ng-Schuchman
VP of Marketing
InformationWeek Business Technology Network
wng@techweb.com

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