As summer comes to a close, healthcare CIOs are beginning to nail down their investment strategy for the upcoming year. Below, five share their plans for 2022.
Editor's note: Responses have been edited lightly for clarity and style.
Michael Restuccia. Senior Vice President and CIO for Corporate Information Services at Penn Medicine (Philadelphia). Penn Medicine continues to make investments in the information services team to further enable the tripartite mission (clinical care, research and education) of the institution. These investments are fairly balanced across several settings and primarily focus on supporting health system expansion into new geographies and service lines, driving additional value from the organization’s rich clinical, revenue cycle and research data via advanced analytics and further advancing the organization’s precision medicine efforts by integrating advancements in research into the clinical care setting.
Zafar Chaudry, MD. Senior Vice President & CIO at Seattle Children's. Seattle Children's strategy for the next year centers around becoming a destination center for pediatric care; anti-racism and equity, diversity and inclusion, quality and safety; virtual care; therapeutics; and mental and behavioral health. To support these initiatives we will continue to modernize major applications such as EMR and enterprise resource planning, maintain strong investments in cybersecurity and leverage predictive analytics to drive better and equitable patient outcomes.
Myra Davis. Chief Information Innovation Officer at Texas Children's Hospital (Houston). Our focus this upcoming year is on enhancing our digital foundation and service resiliency. This critical investment will allow us to continue elevating the digital experiences for our workforce and positive outcomes for the children and women we serve.
A few large programs of work include establishing a data-as-a-service platform for clinical research needs, concierge IT support services, standardization of platforms, extending our secure-by-design model for new technologies and maintaining laser focus on cyber resiliency to provide rapid response to the growing cyber threats in our healthcare sector.
Mark Zirkelbach. CIO at Loma Linda (Calif.) University Medical Center. We’ll invest in cybersecurity, automation and data analytics, as they are all important and really represent the floor of what we all have to do. Where I intend to push for further investments is in ourselves: programs that promote leadership development, ability to work productively from wherever and career opportunities that reflect the dynamic needs of the market. We’ll invest in skills that help us act like a start-up seizing the opportunity right in front of us. If we don’t invest in these areas then we’ll need to rely on someone who doesn’t share our mission to address these needs, and why would we do that?
Mark Amey. CIO at Alameda Health System (Oakland, Calif.). Alameda Health System has spent the past few years replacing and standardizing our EMR systems into a unified solution. Additionally over the past couple of years, we’ve made significant changes on our cybersecurity roadmap and modernization of our infrastructure. We also rapidly deployed a telehealth program during the early stages of COVID. At this point, we are in the process of optimizing all of these areas. We are also focused on organizational efficiency and productivity. To that end, we have started the upgrade of our current time and attendance systems and will be focused over the next couple of years in modernization of our enterprise resource planning solutions.