A chief medical informatics officer (CMIO, also sometimes referred to as a chief medical information officer) is a healthcare executive generally responsible for the health informatics platform required to work with clinical IT staff [1] to support the efficient design, implementation, and use of health technology within a healthcare organization.
Typically the CMIO is a physician[2] with some degree of formal health informatics training or a working equivalent thereof, who often works in conjunction with, or helps to manage other physician, nurse, pharmacy, and general informaticists within the organization.
While historically there have been physicians and others filling this role, the more formal CMIO position started around 1992 [3] to help hospitals support the adoption and implementation of health technologies such as electronic medical records (EMRs), electronic health records (EHRs), computerized physician order entry (CPOE), electronic documentation, health information exchanges (HIEs), and other technologies used in the clinical setting. The trend for healthcare organizations to have a CMIO has continued to grow, and accelerated as technology use in the clinical setting has been stimulated by programs such as the 2009 HITECH (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health) Act.
CMIOs generally report to either the chief medical officer (CMO), chief information officer (CIO), chief operations officer (COO), or chief executive officer (CEO). The exact roles and responsibilities vary widely [4][5][6], from organization to organization, often depending on the reporting structure [7], but they typically include at least one of the following:
1. Strategic planning
2. Policy development
3. Systems development and implementation
4. Stakeholder engagement
5. Capacity Building [8]
6. Informatics education and platform development[9]
7. Data mining and quality reporting
8. Education, Training and curriculum design
Some CMIOs continue to practice clinical medicine, to some degree, to help maintain credibility with other physicians, but this is not essential, just as most CIO's no longer perform programming or other low level non-executive functions.