CIOs are looking to the future of healthcare technology and its vendors to include better ecosystems and improved usability to deliver additional value to hospitals and health systems.
Becker's spoke to five health system CIOs who answered the question: Health tech is making strides, but where should it focus now?
Note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity.
Saad Chaudhry, CIO of Luminis Health (Annapolis, Md). Health tech should focus on better ecosystems.
The current tech forces you to either pick best-of-breed for each function of your organization or settle for a large mega-suite software that does everything, but not quite as well.
In the past, this led to most CIOs switching from the best-of-breed approach, where integration and ongoing care-and-feeding is hard, to a large mega-suite approach, where you are at the mercy of your single large vendor and whatever functionality and price they want to push out to you.
In today's age, there has to be a better ecosystem option out there, that strikes a balance between the two, for the systems and applications landscape that must exist at healthcare organizations in order for them to operate.
Sunil Dadlani, CIO and Senior Vice President of Atlantic Health System (Morristown, N.J.). Health tech should focus on the following areas: quantum computing, the Metaverse, no password solutions, positive patient identification, real time healthcare command centers, patient self-service kiosks, 3-D bioprinting and biometric recognition.
J.D. Whitlock, CIO of Dayton (Ohio) Children's Hospital. It would be great if we could actually build a Learning Healthcare System instead of just talking about it.
This happens to some extent inside of the "walled gardens" of the major EHR platforms, where, for example, the vast majority of Epic customers are happy to share their Epic-build innovations with other Epic customers.
I would go so far as to say there is an expected culture of sharing within the Epic community, which is great for that community, but not necessarily for the rest of our healthcare system. The tricky part is that a lot of what is being shared is really only useful to other Epic customers. This leaves me to ask, how can we build a real Learning Healthcare System for the healthcare system as a whole?
Rich Rogers, CIO and Senior Vice President of Prisma Health (Greenville, S.C.). We need to make technology easier to use for the consumer and clinician, as well as putting more focus on enhanced workflows and patient journeys using embedded technology.
Randy Davis, Chief Information Officer and Vice President at CGH Medical Center (Sterling, Ill.). We've built IT McMansions with beautiful exteriors and no furniture in it.
We've allowed vendors to get away with creating systems difficult for schedulers to use, for physicians and nurses to document in and for a revenue cycle to process claims. It's time for hospitals to demand better of their vendors. Lord knows we've made enough people millionaires in that arena, and it's time for hospitals to raise their voice on a broad range of usability issues.