When William Carracino, MD, was chief resident at New York City-based Mount Sinai Hospital Health System, he wrote a computer program to manage patient lists "in a very old software program and a very old hardware computer," he said. As he graduated residency, his former chief of staff gifted him a tie clip shaped like an integrated circuit.
Now Dr. Carracino is the chief medical informatics officer at Lee Health in Fort Myers Fla., where he works on the medical informatics team, the technology education team and the digital transformation team.
Dr. Carracino took his expertise to the "Becker's Healthcare Digital Health + Health IT" podcast to talk more about innovations in digital technology, population health and digitally enabling physicians. Below is an excerpt from the conversation, and you can hear the entire episode here.
Note: This response has been lightly edited for clarity.
Question: Do you see physicians warming up to these types of technology integration into the way that they’re practicing and some of the things that they had normally done, or is it sometimes a challenge to integrate all this into the workflows that they're used to?
Dr. William Carracino: A serious challenge. One of the phrases I've been batting about, and I'm not sure whether I heard it somewhere or made it up, but keeping the physicians digitally enabled. There's a difference between a provider who's at odds with the technology versus one who has embraced it and dives into it. You could argue that the technology should embrace the user, not vice versa. And I appreciate that, but on the other hand, I definitely see a difference. There are providers out there who are very fast and comfortable with the technology. In their key performance indices of how they care for patients, even simple things as portal signups are so dramatically different when they're engaged with the computer, the technology, whether it be voice recognition or chats, or these bots that I could be thinking about. I'm trying to sort out how we can keep those physicians as digitally enabled.