EHRs have reshaped clinical practice, streamlining data and standardizing care. But chief medical information officers have told Becker’s many physicians feel buried under its demands: endless screens, alerts and clicks that consume more time than the patient sitting in front of them.
“Documentation is only the opening act,” Mark Mabus, MD, chief medical information officer of Springfield, Mo.-based Parkview Health, said. “The real headliner is the nonstop alerts, the inbox pings, the endless clicks and the mental gymnastics that keep clinicians from being present with their patients.”
Across the country, CMIOs are betting that artificial intelligence will ease that burden — and in some cases disrupt health IT on a fundamental level. At Raleigh, N.C.-based WakeMed, Neal Chawla, MD, is preparing for the moment when AI moves from a useful add-on to an enterprise-wide reality.
“It will be a while before AI approaches real maturity, even though it is already proving its benefit and growing within organizations,” Dr. Chawla said. “We all know about the risks with AI but have not seen it when AI is scaled enterprise-wide, which is where we are quickly headed.”
That shift, CMIOs said, will recast their jobs. Once the stewards of EHR optimization, they are now being pulled into AI governance: writing rules of the road, teaching clinicians to “trust but verify” and putting monitoring in place after initiatives go live.
“Our work will be building a practical, trustworthy framework for clinical AI while navigating the onslaught of everything AI,” said Bonnie Boles, MD, CMIO of Carrollton, Ga.-based Tanner Health.
For some, that role feels overdue. K. Nadeem Ahmed, MD, CMIO of Ridgewood, N.J.-based Valley Health System, said years of frustration came from trying to bend clinicians to rigid systems.
“All the energy CMIOs spend on trying to get clinicians to adapt to complex software systems will now be reversed: the software will adapt to the clinician,” Dr. Ahmed said. “This is the ultimate paradigm shift and I welcome it wholeheartedly.”
Others look beyond generative models toward “agentic AI,” systems that can act on behalf of patients and clinicians alike. At Ithaca, N.Y.-based Cayuga Health, John-Paul Mead, MD, envisions a future when a patient’s call is answered not by a switchboard but by an AI agent that can retrieve the right information from inside the organization. The bet, he said, is that it “works reliably, and lets patients have a better experience with calling into the organization.”
Even for those not focused squarely on AI, the question is still one of scale. At Los Angeles-based UCLA Health, CMIO Eric Cheng,, said genomics is the next major challenge. The workflows — ordering, storing, transmitting patients’ information — exist, but they remain far from seamless. Making them usable for both providers and patients, he said, is a technical and cultural hurdle similar to adopting AI.
Other leaders anticipate the shift happening at the patient’s end. C. Becket Mahnke, MD, CMIO of Wenatchee, Wash.-based Confluence Health, told Becker’s he believes patients will adopt AI tools regardless of whether clinicians recommend them. That, he argued, creates an opening for physicians to focus on complex cases. And at Scottsdale, Ariz.-based HonorHealth, CMIO Matthew Anderson, MD, said the explosion of at-home diagnostics will force health systems to rethink how they validate and integrate patient-generated data.
Tying these perspectives together is a single theme: CMIOs are no longer just optimizing software. They are positioning their systems — and their clinicians — for an industry in which technology is not only everywhere in the EHR but also making decisions alongside them.
“With AI in every corner of the EHR, the CMIO’s role is shifting from EHR optimization to AI governance, ensuring safety, compliance, and true clinical value,” Dr. Boles said.
The post The ‘ultimate paradigm shift’ coming CMIOs’ way appeared first on Becker’s Hospital Review | Healthcare News & Analysis.
Health IT
