Jon Burns, senior vice president and CIO of Baltimore-based University of Maryland Medical System, has worked in healthcare for 37 years, spanning administrative, financial and health IT positions.
In his first job out of school, Mr. Burns served as a supervisor of revenue accounting — but he had different long-term goals. "My goal early on was really to move from finance into operations," he says. "Operations has always been a passion for me, in terms of learning how things work."
However, as IT took on a larger role in the healthcare industry, Mr. Burns found his niche. In his first IT position, the board of a small Midwestern health system asked him to step in and oversee technology during an organizational turnaround project.
"It suited my desire to get more involved in operations," he explains. "Over the years, IT has become so embedded in the operations of an organization, from both the clinical and business sides."
Mr. Burns now manages IT, clinical informatics and enterprise data analytics as CIO of the University of Maryland Medical System, a 12-hospital system with more than 150 locations. He has held this title for 11 years.
"I just keep learning more about the industry," he says. "I tried to become a student of the industry early on, and learn as much as I could about how things worked and how hospitals operated. That's the absolute best part of the job: learning something new."
Mr. Burns spoke with Becker's Hospital Review about the changing role of IT and how EMR integration catalyzed a systemwide cultural shift at University of Maryland Medical System.
Editor's note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: How has the IT landscape changed since you began working in healthcare in the 1980s?
Jon Burns: IT was largely a data processing shop. In fact, that's probably what most places called their IT organization — data processing, and it was probably located in some place in the organization that no one could find and that no one knew about. It produced bills and made sure you got paid, but there were very few clinical systems. IT was more of a tactical function, with very little strategic impact in the organization. That has changed immensely over the past 37 years. Today, IT's not the driver, but it's clearly integrated into every aspect of what we do from a healthcare perspective, both on the business side as well as the clinical side. If a computer system goes down today, physicians can't do their work, they can't do their craft. IT's a foundational element of every hospital and every practice across the U.S.
Q: What's the biggest challenge to overseeing EMR adoption and usage across a 12-hospital system?
JB: Eleven years ago, when I showed up at University of Maryland Medical System, IT was run independently at each one of our hospitals. The first challenge was consolidating IT to a single operating unit that functioned to support the entire organization. As we moved toward everybody being on a single EMR platform, one of the things we had to address was this culture of individuality and making everybody in our hospitals part of a single team. We created this model called "user design centers," in which people from the hospitals came together to define how we operate the system. The challenge was bringing people together across our enterprise, to have them articulate their best practices, but ultimately come up with a single way of doing their craft.
It was really the beginning of a culture shift in our organization. People did the work, but I think the EMR was a catalyst for that change. It started those interesting — sometimes difficult, sometimes challenging — conversations about how we're going to operate as an integrated delivery system.
Q: Looking toward the next year, what are some of your IT goals for the University of Maryland Medical System?
JB: Our enterprise data and analytics team is relatively new. One goal is to begin to embed our clinical informatics and data analytics feeds together. We want to accumulate data from other sources to help our clinicians with real-time decision support, so they can base decisions on more than the data that's in front of them in Epic. Our teams have also built some models around predicting the onset of sepsis, as an example, or the possibility of a patient being readmitted.
Another goal focuses on assisting the organization in its journey toward population health. We need to figure out how to obtain data, not only within our systems, but also when patients are not in front of us. What do we do, and how do we engage patients to help our clinicians manage and monitor them? How can we work to improve outcomes so they're not back in the emergency room? IT has a unique role to play in achieving those things.
Q: As a CIO, what are some health IT trends you want to learn more about?
JB: I'm very interested in the whole notion of patient engagement. How are new patients, like millennials, going to want to purchase healthcare? What are the things they're going to expect and need from the industry that's different from my generation? I'm watching what other industries are doing, looking at things like Amazon Echo, since those technologies are what people are using. Will that play a role, at some point in time, in delivery of care? How do we start to exploit those types of technologies to deliver faster, cheaper and more convenient care to patients?