The health IT field is changing rapidly as new technologies emerge and patient preferences shift to become more consumer-focused. This means the need for technology will evolve to meet the needs of healthcare organizations as they look to deliver care more efficiently and effectively.
Below, three CIOs from health systems across the country weigh in on how they think the field will change and grow in the next three to five years.
Note: Their responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Joshua Glandorf. CIO of UC San Diego Health: I think the focus is going to be more on patient engagement — how do we connect with them, and how do we understand their needs proactively?
We've been fairly reactive today and with COVID, we've been very reactive. But I think it's allowed us to understand our customer base and our patient base a bit more so that we can be more thoughtful about how we engage them.
We're starting to be more thoughtful about how we get in front of them, how we communicate with them and how we provide a service that's on par with ordering something from Amazon.
So we need to make things quick, easy and something that provides some enjoyment.
I think there's also going to be an aspect of [artificial intelligence] that comes into this that allows us to better leverage our data in a thoughtful way so that we can proactively understand what patients need and when they don't understand something.
Sophy Lu. CIO of Northwell Health (New Hyde Park, N.Y.): Since the pandemic, healthcare technology has been in the center of attention with lots of emerging tech, digital startups and portfolios. I see this evolving and will continue to refine and mature in collaboration with health system pilots, clinical and workflow acumen. We will also harness the power of data, advance sciences to use it, map it, orchestrate it, and non-traditional players will continue to disrupt healthcare and bring new expectations and experiences to personalize care delivery and wellness.
It is a pivotal time for transformation. Healthcare, technology and adjacent functions (e.g., pharma, government, payer, research, etc.) need to collaborate and elevate pieces and ultimately an entire tapestry of services for every touch, for everyone.
It's also so important that as tech evolves we do not lose the human touch, privacy and quality of the care product.
Bobbie Byrne, MD. CIO of Advocate Aurora Health (Downers Grove, Ill., and Milwaukee): Some of the things that we have been talking about for years is how do we get the patient to the right place, the right venue, to the right clinician at the right time.
And as an industry, we've not been able to move the needle on this as much as I would like.
I think we are on the precipice of being able to really do some exciting things in this arena and that is because people finally got used to telemedicine, asynchronous and electronic communication during COVID.
This helped us realize that this is an efficient way to take care of patients and in some ways is the superior way to take care of a patient.
We did home monitoring of COVID patients using a pulse oximeter and a tablet and one nurse was able to monitor several hundred patients remotely.
We now do that for our home health patients as well as with patients suffering from other chronic illnesses, and I think that we could now probably start to do that at scale.
Two or three years from now, if we're back to the same old same way where everybody gets in their car and drives to the physician office for everything, I think we will have missed out on an opportunity.