Having served as a Cerner executive and now a children's hospital CIO, Matt MacVey has seen health IT from both sides of the business.
In fact, Mr. MacVey was a Cerner associate when he joined the Bear Institute for Health Innovation at Washington, D.C.-based Children's National Hospital in 2017. The center is a collaboration between the hospital and EHR vendor. In 2019, Children's National hired him to be its CIO after an 18-year career with Cerner.
One thing that differentiates his work now is what he called "a razor-focused, clear" mission.
"You walk in the door, you see children and families," Mr. MacVey, who is also an executive vice president, told Becker's. "The difference is that we serve that whole unit too. As we design systems and technology, we have to think about how we're interacting with the entirety of the family — the parent or the guardian and the child or children."
He said he aims to create the best digital engagement platform and telemedicine capabilities for those pediatric patients and their loved ones.
His department also supports the work of scientists using genetic-based precision medicine to identify and treat rare diseases in children. "It's absolutely mind-blowing how talented and innovative our researchers are," he said.
The Bear Institute for Health Innovation started in 2013 to help make health technology more representative of the needs of pediatric patients.
"Many of the systems are first built for adults and then adapted to take care of kids, all the way down to ensuring we have the right weight-based dosing," he said. "The Bear Institute for Innovation allowed us to influence Cerner's roadmap and development around those capabilities."
The center built a wayfinding tool to help families navigate the hospital, a rounding app to organize clinician rounds and notify families when providers would be at the bedside, and a way to store genetic variants in EHRs to support precision medicine, a first for Oracle Cerner.
Mr. MacVey also hopes to leverage the clout of the Bear Center and partners like Oracle Cerner to increase investment in pediatric digital health, which represents just a sliver of that industry overall.
His top priority in his first three years on the job has been investing in cybersecurity tools and staff, including bringing on a chief information security officer, to keep the organization safe from cybercriminals, he said.
His next focus has been consolidating data centers and moving some of Children's National's data to the cloud as part of a hybrid approach.
He's also working to transform the hospital into what he called a "data-enabled organization."
"Because of the challenges and headwinds in front of us — like workforce challenges, growing supply chain costs, our need to understand our consumers better, and more sophistication on how we get reimbursed for the quality service we do — they're all driving us toward having to get really good at data," he said.
He envisions the slowdown in the tech industry benefiting hospitals like his, and he's already been seeing more talent in the market. He said the increased focus on digital requires a set of skills that "weren't part of what an IT organization looked like three, four, five years ago."
"Back then, it was heavy investment in ERP [enterprise resource planning] system support, EHR system support, traditional server management," he said. "And that all really shifted to 'OK, now we've got to build development capacity and have people who understand data movement, APIs [application programming interfaces] and how to interact with SaaS [software-as-a-service] solutions.'
"And that's hard to find talent for. But we're feeling that ease up a little bit, and that's probably a function of the overall marketplace."
He said future IT innovations will include more voice-enabled EHRs to reduce the number of clicks among providers, as well as the further advancement of precision medicine for kids.
"The promise that has for healthcare in general, the promise that has for pediatrics, is astounding," he said. "We're not far from a day where we're going to [genetically] sequence every child. We're going to have all these insights, and it's only to serve the treatment of them holistically. And I'm just excited about it."