ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the critical role effective leadership plays in ensuring the success of EMR implementations. Sponsorship is a critical factor in establishing context for change and ensuring a successful EMR implementation. Sponsorship is the single most important factor for large, disruptive organizational change efforts. Sponsors make the hard decisions, provide the budget and resources, rally the troops as needed, reinforce desired behaviors, and model the required changes. Change management methodologies often refer to leadership as sponsorship. In fact, an effective sponsor exhibits many of the same characteristics of an effective leader. Effective sponsorship often requires a passionate commitment to a cause. In the case of an EMR implementation, the executive sponsor is the leader of just a software implementation but of an organizational transformation. Change efforts are always more successful when there are clear and present sponsors supporting and modeling the change.
