A Leadership Role for Informatics

Nosing though my copy of the Harvard Business Review this month, I read a really interesting article on my caBIG friend and colleague, Dr. Laura Esserman. Laura is a cancer surgeon and the director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center at UCSF. What is really cool is that she is also the Associate Director of Medical Informatics at the UCSF comprehensive cancer center. This is not only a remarkable achievement, but is also an important demonstration of what it takes to get biomedical informatics onto the agenda of the clinical and medical research leadership within academic medical centers like UCSF. By bridging the two worlds (and by playing a serious game of hardball, as per the HBR piece) Laura has been able to make significant progress in her efforts to develop meaningful informatics-backed translational research and bring it to the forefront in fighting cancer.

This closely matches what we hear in the field- informatics teams that are closely tied to the specific needs of their stakeholders, and have strong support from their academic and administrative leadership at the highest levels can do really remarkable things. Those that are either far removed from the medical and scientific community at their institutions or do not have the ear of senior leadership have far less success in their institutions, and are less able to participate in the kind of exciting change that Laura and her team have been creating.

The funny thing is that getting the ear of senior leadership and being in a position of working closely with the clinical and scientific stakeholders in an institution is not as hard as you might think. In fact, as one of my mentors told me many years ago- if you want to see your ideas flourish, and have informatics and IT participate in the strategic development of the company, you have to first "make sure that email works." This mentor was the CIO for many years at one of the largest personal products companies, and as such had a lot of experience dealing with leadership for whom IT was not always considered a key part of the corporate mission. By knowing what the simple necessities are for the scientific, clinical and administrative leadership and making sure that they work consistently and well is the ticket to allowing informatics and IT to more fully participate in the mission of the institution and to realize the amazing progress that is possible- just like Laura has.