Making sure IT systems are running — and running effectively — is a concern of every hospital and health system CIO. That's most definitely true when they help inform life-saving chemotherapy.
"The complexity of our patients really ratchets up the complexity of the work that we do," Craig Owen, vice president and CIO of Houston-based MD Anderson Cancer Center, told Becker's.
He compared an MD Anderson radiologist reviewing images of a chemotherapy patient going back months — or even years — to one at a regular hospital assessing someone who broke a pelvis in a car accident.
"The tech stack is very different when you're looking at a pelvic exam that was just done 30 minutes ago versus a list of priors that may go back five or 10 years," Mr. Owen said. "When you're seeing 800-plus new cancer patients a week, you start to understand the complexity."
He said he talked to peers from Burlington, Vt.-based UVM Medical Center about their biggest challenges in dealing with a 2020 ransomware attack. Their top one: oncology.
While Mr. Owen took over as CIO in 2020, he's been with the institution more than 30 years — proving, he says, the type of loyalty it breeds among employees.
"Making cancer history is not just a slogan, it's a passion of 23,500 people," he said. "If you work here more than six months, you will likely have a friend or loved one come through MD Anderson, and it will bind you to that mission."
Still, he aims to go beyond that to retain the more than 900 IT staffers in his department, emphasizing trust, autonomy and accountability. MD Anderson had flex scheduling even before COVID-19, allowing employees to work from home a day or two a week back then.
For recruitment, Mr. Owen sometimes gets IT workers who are tired of the cyclical nature of nearby Big Oil, but he hasn't seen any trickle down from all the recent Big Tech job cuts. He said he expects he might in the coming months as those laid-off workers' severance packages end.
MD Anderson is the biggest user of Epic's Beacon oncology EHR module, which allows providers to build chemotherapy protocols digitally, he said. The cancer center has also been going live with a clinical trial management system and recently adopted ServiceNow's digital IT workflow platform.
Mr. Owen reports to the chief technology and digital officer at MD Anderson, which also has a chief innovation officer, chief information security officer and chief data officer, a position it added about a year ago.
He said CIOs nowadays need to have a tight connection with the clinical side. "You cannot just know technology, you have to understand how you leverage technology to digitally enable clinical operations in the rest of the organization," Mr. Owen said. "You have to be able to connect with the clinicians and the patients and understand what they're going through."