Healthcare CIOs need to have a finger on the pulse of change and innovation to stay competitive and deliver the best care, B.J. Moore, chief information officer of Renton, Wash.-based Providence, recently told Becker's.
Mr. Moore was a guest on the "Becker's Hospital Digital Health and Health IT" podcast to discuss how he sees the healthcare CIO role changing.
Note: This is an edited excerpt. Listen to the full podcast here.
Question: When you think about the CIO role as well as the technology and digital teams at Providence, how will they be changing over the next few years? Is there anything you will need more of, or less of, or how do you see that all evolving?
B.J. Moore: I kind of see us evolving in two ways. One, it's really helping to bring that business vision together; ultimately the business needs to own it, but I think IT can be that catalyst to say, hey, let us look at a caregiver, pain point, let us look at an end-to-end caregiver experience, or journey, and really facilitate that dialogue. Traditionally, I think IT has been more of an order-taker in healthcare. So how do you get that business foot forward, bring the business constituents forward and look at these end-to-end journeys? It creates natural evolution for the next thing. I think one thing CIOs and IT teams need to move toward is more of an engineering muscle. Traditionally, at least in my observation of healthcare IT, it's been very much a system integrator; here are the five off-the-shelf products that I am going to implement, configure and they have the needs, they have the capabilities that they have. When I say engineering it is you now have those five systems, but how do you, how do you get those five systems to work seamlessly together?
How do you automate those systems? You know, the example I gave earlier, how do you maybe create a thin client or a mobile experience that spreads across those five systems? So the end user does not know there are five systems behind the scenes, and you create a seamless experience for them. And that is only going to be by our IT teams hiring engineers. Providence, when I joined three years ago, my first question was, "How many engineers do we have on the IT team?" The answer was none. We did not have any engineers. And so moving away from just being system implementers, but to also add engineering chops or strengths to our IT teams, I think is at least the way we are evolving here at Providence.