Health system CIOs intend to return to the basics and strengthen their IT foundations in 2024, according to a recent Forbes article.
IT leaders necessarily turned "scrappy, nimble, and innovative" during the pandemic — whether to, say, quickly develop a vaccine app or extend hospital networks to the parking lot — setting aside "standards, policies, and in many cases, price tags" in the process, wrote Saad Chaudhry, chief digital and information officer of Annapolis, Md.-based Luminis Health, in the Dec. 29 story.
But now the IT pendulum has begun to swing back, though as with the shift to remote work, things will never totally return to the way they were, Mr. Chaudhry argued. "Post-pandemic, new leaps in tech which we all want to utilize (like AI) are forcing us to ensure our foundations in IT are solid, that we have all the basics done well across our system," he told Becker's. "And we can no longer attempt to go back to a pre-pandemic normal."
Mr. Chaudhry cited his peers who have expressed similar sentiments: "It's like Maslow's hierarchy of needs — the most basic needs have to be met before achieving higher-level needs," B.J. Moore, CIO of Renton, Wash.-based Providence, said in an October Wall Street Journal article. "In this case, without a strong foundation, an organization probably cannot breed technological progress and innovation."
"Exactly what I am focusing on for my organization," Boston Children's Hospital CIO Heather Nelson commented on the article on LinkedIn. "Gotta get back to basics!"