Jordan Tannenbaum, MD, vice president, CIO and CMIO of Saint Peter's Healthcare System in New Brunswick, N.J., looks to leverage AI and improved patient portals to improve patient outcomes and accessibility.
Question: What initiative are you most proud of leading at your hospital or health system?
Dr. Jordan Tannenbaum: When I came into the CIO position, the hospital was in the process of implementing a new EMR, one of the most comprehensive and difficult tasks for any IT department. This was the hospital's third EMR implementation and was to be a complete rip and replace of the previous product. The physicians, nurses, and staff were apprehensive after their experience with the first two EMRs.
After an enormous amount of validation testing, workflow analysis, and delays to ensure critical defects were fixed prior to go-live, the actual implementation and go-live went smoothly and was well accepted by the physicians, nurses and staff. The transition included a shift from paper physician notes to electronic notes, which was a major culture change for the physicians. After a period of optimization and break/fix cycles, we achieved a robust adoption of the EMR, a major milestone in today's healthcare IT environment.
Q: How do you set a culture of communication between the IT, clinical and executive leaders at your hospital or health system?
JT: We have established forums for each of these interactions. For the physician side, there is a physician-led EHR committee that makes global decisions regarding implementation, workflow, and configurations for the EHR. This committee also discusses non-EHR IT issues that may affect physicians. Similarly, there is a standing weekly meeting between nursing and the IT nurse analysts to resolve problems, convey updates and changes, and discuss requested enhancements. Ancillary services are also invited to this meeting.
On the executive side, the CIO position is a vice president position, and thus sits on the senior leadership council reporting directly to the CEO and other vice presidents at a summary level. Additionally, an executive level IT steering committee meets quarterly to discuss strategy, issues and budgetary considerations at a more detailed level.
Communications among the various segments can be a challenge, but the CIO, along with IT managers, attempts to synchronize important messaging across the various stakeholder constituencies.
Q: Where do you see the biggest opportunity for health IT to make a difference at your organization in the next 18-24 months?
JT: There are two main areas in which we intend to leverage health IT. First, we are launching into an advanced population health program, installing an artificial intelligence and analytics solution to track our compliance with our individual ACO contract requirements as well as general, overall, quality measures. The goal of this initiative is to detect, track, and intervene for the patient population in the areas that will make the greatest impact to the population. Additionally, having our own, real time data will help close care gaps at time of service, and ultimately result in a tangible ROI in terms of improved reimbursement on ACO contracts.
Secondly, we are looking to expand our patient engagement with various technologies. Improving our patient portal by adding end user capabilities to the mobile app and to the web experience, enabling third party app access to patient EHR data via FHIR interfaces, and improving wayfinding with technology augmentation. Personalizing the patient experience at every step is a major long-term goal.
Q: What are you doing to recruit and retain the best talent for your team?
JT: IT departments consist of highly educated personnel with specialized skills and degrees unique to the field. We treat our department as a non-clinical professional department and regard each department member as a valued IT professional.
Our organizational culture is very positive and inclusive, and our faith-based mission attracts IT personnel from all cultures and backgrounds. These people are motivated to ensure that the front-line clinicians can deliver the best in patient care, and that the revenue cycle and support services can work efficiently to support effective hospital operations.
We encourage each employee to own their projects and for managers to encourage the growth of skills and education of their employees. We encourage open communication, transparency, and innovative thinking to create a vibrant workplace.
To participate in future CIO Q&As, contact Laura Dyrda at ldyrda@beckershealthcare.com.