The Five Rights of Effective Clinical Informatics Leadership

Right Synthesis

Effective Clinical Informatics Leadership requires navigating a range of confusing alternatives and finding creative solutions. This can be challenging even with complete knowledge of the issues. In this situation, structured analytical methods combined with a trusted sounding board can help the executive apply existing skills to this new set of challenges and make the decisions less daunting and more easily explained and accepted. 

Robust analysis demands considering many alternatives, defining criteria for prioritizing them, and recognizing different ways to reconcile conflicting information and priorities into coherent and effective plans. To aid that activity, Dr. Kremsdorf, MIT-trained to have a strong "technical ego,"  combines creative thinking methodologies and personal computer software to recognize new alternatives and relationships among facts, processes and people. The techniques are easy to learn but unfamiliar to most. Coaching, as the methods are used to address real-life challenges, can bring most executives up to speed quickly so the approach can be used in all domains of responsibility.

Only the executive can figure out the best course, but by asking the right questions and drawing out the important issues and assumptions, coaching can help the executive "see the forest as well as the trees." However, the executive must learn to do the fundamental analytical work, just as the ballplayer must step up to the plate, not the batting coach.

The scale of analytical work done by Dr. Kremsdorf is shown by the consensus building around clinical information systems done at a 48-hospital chain and the Medication Safety Tools 2003 report.

Having considered the range of possibilities and formulated some approaches, the leader is equipped to energize the organization in working through comprehensive solutions by helping them to have the Right Focus.