Four CIOs from health systems across the U.S. discuss how they're allocating their health IT budgets for 2019.
Question: How are you allocating the budget? What difference is there this year compared to previous years?
Ken Lee, senior vice president and CIO at Centura Health (Centennial, Colo.): Our budgeting process focuses on three areas: keep the lights on, enhancements and strategic projects. As we continually drive efficiencies in our KLO spend, we allow increased investments in enhancements and strategic projects. The focus is on return on investment and alignment to our Centura Health 2025 corporate strategy and annual business goals. Bottom line, our success in IT depends on our alignment to business goals and metrics.
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Marc Probst, CIO and vice president at Intermountain Healthcare (Salt Lake City): Significant investment continues in the area of clinical system optimization. We are also increasing investment in consumer experience development capabilities, rapid movement to the cloud to decrease data center costs, as well as to many areas as a service.
We continue to decrease support costs but increase investment in new technology and capabilities.
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Ken Lawonn, senior vice president and CIO at Sharp HealthCare (San Diego): Overall, the budget is allocated similar to previous years with staffing and benefits being about 50 percent of costs. We are seeing an increase in software as a service as more systems are moving to cloud or application service provider models.
This year, more spending is going toward software as a service, analytics, information security and mobile development. There is a slight reduction as a percentage in supplies and maintenance compared to previous years.
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Mike Minear, senior vice president and CIO at Lehigh Valley Health Network (Allentown, Pa.): LVHN does not allocate technology costs to other organizational units. I have found several challenges to create an allocation basis that is acceptable; allocating technology costs creates many barriers to fund and manage new projects and ongoing support of technology. At LVHN, the most senior executive team governs technology investments, so it works well in our organization to have all technology costs in a single corporate IT unit, allowing us to focus on value and meeting organization goals and needs versus moving around technology costs between organizational units.
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