Historically, nursing informatics was the liaison between the clinical and technical side. Today, nursing informatics today is one of the industry's most powerful specialties. In this episode of The Cerner Podcast, Amye Gilio, director and regional nursing executive at Cerner, discusses the role of the modern CNIO and the growth of the nursing informatics profession.

There’s a lot of talk in the health care industry today around digital transformation and how organizations should shift to a data-driven culture. For the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, a mental health teaching hospital located in Toronto, Canada, these ideas aren’t just buzzwords. They are the building blocks by which this organization achieved HIMSS Stage 7. In this episode of The Cerner Podcast, we’re joined by Dr. Damian Jankowicz, vice president, chief information officer and chief privacy officer at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Dr. Jankowicz discusses how CAMH has transformed itself into a data-driven organization through implementation of its clinical information system (CIS) as well as an enterprise data strategy.

Electronic health records (EHR) systems can provide a myriad of benefits for the health care system, including better patient care and cost savings. However, EHR technology isn’t perfect – and post-implementation issues can range from end-user dissatisfaction stemming from workflow issues and documentation and change management needs to a lack of communication and provider engagement. In this episode of The Cerner Podcast, we're joined by Dr. Erine Erickson, regional chief medical information officer at Dignity Health. She discusses strategies for successful EHR implementation and optimization.

With more and more focus on a consumer-centric health care environment, hospitals and health care systems are increasingly facing organization and strategic change. In this episode of The Cerner Podcast, we’re joined by Robert Diamond, senior vice president and CIO at Health Quest. Bob has more than 30 years of experience in health care technology. Bob discusses the shift toward consumerism in health care and how Health Quest has adapted.

Increasingly, community hospitals are being tasked with doing more with less. Chinese Hospital is a non-profit community hospital based in San Francisco. It offers a wide range of medical, surgical, and specialty care to a multicultural community. Chinese Hospital aims to deliver quality health care in a cost-effective way while offering health care access to all socioeconomic levels. In this episode of The Cerner Podcast, we’re joined by Keith Minard, the chief information officer at Chinese Hospital Association and Chinese Community Health Plan. He discusses the impact that health IT can have on small community hospitals.

Today’s health care industry is facing a huge influx of data. That should be an exciting premise, as more patient information can lead to more informed clinical decisions. But there’s more to getting value from data than simply the amount of it. For hospitals and health care organizations, getting the most out of data means diving deep into analytics to form actionable insights. In this episode of the Cerner Podcast, we’re joined by Dr. Earl Steinberg, the CEO at xG Health Solutions and a nationally recognized expert in data analytics and health care quality improvement. Launched by Geisinger in 2013, xG Health Solutions empowers health care organizations to optimize clinical and financial performance through care redesign and management, analytics and clinical content and decision support. In this episode, Dr. Steinberg discusses how analytics algorithms can improve patient outcomes and provider performance.

In the past decade, advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have continued to make a measurable impact on the way health care is delivered. There is perhaps no better example of this impact than in the field of population health management, where AI has enabled us to analyze large patient data sets to help clinicians make better, more educated decisions when caring for their patients. In this episode of The Cerner Podcast, we’re joined by Dr. William Feaster, the chief medical information officer at Children's Hospital of Orange County. With more than 40 years of experience in information technology, Dr. Feaster’s leadership was integral in CHOC being awarded the 2016 HIMSS Enterprise Davies Award, one of the highest accolades in the HIT industry.

As health IT has evolved, so has the role of the CIO. Today, a health care organization’s chief information officer must be prepared to meet changing organizational, clinical and population health-related demands with increasingly capable and innovative technology. Less than a decade ago, 9 out of every 10 physicians in the U.S. updated their patients’ health records on paper charts. In part thanks to the introduction of meaningful use in 2009, electronic health record (EHR) systems have been widely adopted and have transformed health care – and by the end of 2017, approximately 90 percent of physicians across the country were using EHRs. With EHR adoption came the influx of big data, there have come questions around data access rights and a heightened need for interoperability. These concerns and more sit at the feet of the modern CIO. In this episode of The Cerner Podcast, we’re joined by Dr. John Halamka, the CIO and the CMIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Dr. Halamka joined Beth Israel Deaconess in 1998 as the Chief Medical Information Officer, and today is responsible for the IT strategy, security and operations there. In this episode, he discusses some of the top issues CIOs and CMIOs are facing in today’s marketplace.

Critical access hospitals are often the lifeblood of rural areas in the United States. The critical access hospital designation is designed to reduce the financial vulnerability of rural hospitals and improve access to health care by keeping essential services in rural communities. This episode of The Cerner Podcast features Susan Schmidt, the EHR strategist at Pagosa Springs Medical Center. Pagosa Springs Medical Center is a critical access hospital based in southwestern Colorado, and with only 11 beds, it is the smallest facility to achieve HIMSS Stage 7, and only the second facility to achieve Stage 7 under the newer, stricter 2018 guidelines. In this episode, Susan discusses the importance of critical access hospitals and how health IT helps Pagosa Springs stay independent.

In the final installment of our HIMSS18 series on The Cerner Podcast, we're peeling back the curtain and delivering insights straight from the floor. This special edition episode of The Cerner Podcast features Dan Munro, a journalist covering health care technology innovation and policy. A Forbes Contributor since 2011, Dan's work has also appeared in Newsweek, The Huffington Post, Re/Code, Techonomy and many health care-specific publications. His first book, Casino Healthcare, was published in 2016. In this episode, Dan talks through his biggest takeaways from this year's HIMSS conference and the message behind Casino Healthcare.