Stories by Brian Eastwood

An industry that’s as unique as healthcare is bound to have some equally unique executive roles. Here are nine C-level titles that are either specific to healthcare or got their start in healthcare.

CIOs in every industry play tug of war with their executive peers. For healthcare CIOs, the game's often even more one-sided. In addition to pulling against the marketing, operations and finance departments, among others, they can face opposition from the medical side of the business.

"Overall, information governance programs are less prevalent and less mature in healthcare organizations than is warranted, given the importance of information."

It's been a rough year for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT -- and it's unclear when things will get better.

A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers study concludes that, for the bulk of users, wearable health devices are a novelty that wears off. Only 21 percent of 1,000 consumers surveyed own a wearable, and fewer than half of device owners wear them daily.

To describe the current state of the healthcare CIO role, Jim Turnbull uses the military-inspired acronym VUCA: Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

Steven Sasson built the first digital camera in 1975. He worked for Kodak. Thirty-seven years later, Kodak went out of business because it failed to embrace technology it had invented.

IT leaders today frequently mention the importance of bringing social, mobile, analytics and Cloud technology - the so-called "SMAC stack" - into a single, integrated architecture.

Now's a good time to be a healthcare startup. Investors have poured between $3 billion and $5 billion into the digital health market so far in 2014, according to Rock Health and StartUp Health. (The two groups track funding differently, which is why there's such a discrepancy.) Meanwhile, Accenture expects the digital health market to reach $6.5 billion by 2017.

Healthcare's increasing reliance on medical devices, coupled with an ever-growing list of healthcare IT security threats, has pushed device safety to the forefront of the cybersecurity conversation. (The pacemaker hack on Homeland, the Emmy-winning Showtime drama, drew attention to the issue, too.)

Thomas Eric Duncan, the Dallas-area man with the first diagnosed case of Ebola in the United States, told a Texas Health Presbyterian nurse during his Sept. 25 visit to the hospital that he'd been in Africa within the last four months.

As the second year of open enrollment under healthcare reform nears, there are both celebrations and complications.

At the beginning of National Health IT Week, the Health Information and Management Systems Society released a report examining 25 years of the HIMSS Leadership Survey. (The survey itself came out in February at the annual HIMSS conference.)

The healthcare industry's shift from its dominant fee-for-service structure forces organizations to rethink the way they do business. Embracing a value-based, bundled payment model means doing more to connect patients to providers, providers to each other, providers to payers and patients to payers.

On March 20, Dr. Daniel J. Nigrin, senior vice president for information services and CIO at Boston Children's Hospital, got word that his organization faced an imminent threat from Anonymous in response to the hospital's diagnosis and treatment of a 15-year-old girl removed from her parent's care by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.