It was the height of the Great Depression, a seemingly terrible time to launch America’s first business journal—Fortune. Or was it? America was wrought with economic crisis and Fortune set out to smartly profile entrepreneurial culture. The crash piqued American business leaders’ desire to look into the back-offices of entrepreneurs to see what was working and what was not; and to look at government policy and practice to offer insight and truth. Fortune met a need, it answered the call with real-world, intelligent, upscale, objective—and often brash and critical—articles for business leaders under siege.

Fast-forward to the present-day Great Recession. Today, healthcare in America is in a similar crisis. Healthcare costs too much, it struggles with great inefficiency, lacks intelligent business tools and best-practice standards, and frankly, too many errors still occur. Only 7.6 percent of U.S. hospitals utilize basic electronic health records (EHRs), while just 1.5 percent have implemented comprehensive EHRs, according to a just-released study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Enter the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—the Economic Stimulus Plan, as we call it. We are in the Age of Health IT. With an endowment of $19.2 billion, our industry is being given the chance to realign our business practices and financial incentives to improve outcomes for our patients. Clinical functionality now ranks next to financial functionality, health IT leaders agree. Quality of care must improve. Cost must be reduced. Coverage needs to expand. And success will be measured in better outcomes.

And so too, a new journal emerges to respond to these modern-day challenges. Thus, CMIO magazine, and our companion weekly newsletter and website, will provide provocative ideas, studies in excellence, leading-edge research, innovative trends, proven strategies, forward-thinking visions and peer-to-peer advice for C-suite, physician and clinical executives in IT. CMIO readers are charged with maintaining the integrity of patient data, identifying and exploiting enterprise knowledge resources, employing best practices, maximizing operational benefits and ROI of clinical information technologies and advocating for physician-friendly solutions. CMIO will challenge status quo delivery methods, seek new and innovative ways to improve quality of care, reduce operational costs, enlarge the clinical knowledgebase and compile core measures to track performance improvements. Like our tagline says, we are all about information, evidence and effectiveness in medicine.

Healthcare’s success will be realized through widespread interoperability of clinical data systems as well as more intelligent information systems as we evolve into the age of personalized medicine.

Thank you for joining us.