Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO)

Chief Medical Information Officer, or CMIO, essentially serves as the bridge between medical and IT departments at a health care organization. This person may also be referred to as the director of medical informatics or health informatics.

A chief medical informatics officer  is a healthcare executive generally responsible for the health informatics platform required to work with clinical IT staff  to support the efficient design, implementation, and use of health technology within a healthcare organization.

Typically the CMIO is a physician 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 to help hospitals support the adoption and implementation of health technologies such as electronic medical records (EMR), electronic health records (EHRs), computerized physician order entry (CPOE), electronic documentation, health information exchanges (HIE), 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 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act).