The Words Healthcare CIOs Don't Want To Hear

'My laptop was stolen, but it had a password. That’s the same as encryption, right?'

No matter what your job, there are certain phrases – whether said by bosses, colleagues or clients – that are just plain unwelcome: words that foretell frustration and added workload at best, panic and red-alert crisis response at worst.

For hospital chief information officers, there's no shortage of these ominous sentences. With so much at stake – integrity and uptime of critical IT systems, omnipresent threats to data security, millions of meaningful use dollars – the last thing CIOs want to hear are words that promise to complicate or delay their long daily to-do lists.

We asked CIOs from hospitals across the country about the phrases they dread hearing – from their IT staff, from the CEO or CFO, from the compliance department, from doctors or nurses. Whether they had to do with technology snafus, privacy threats, budget challenges, clinician complaints or assorted other headaches, there were plenty of them...