Stephanie Lahr, MD, CIO and chief medical information officer of Monument Health in Rapid City, S.D., appeared on the Becker's Healthcare Podcast to talk about technology challenges and opportunities for rural healthcare institutions.
Below is an excerpt from the podcast. Listen to the full episode here.
Question: How is competition evolving and affecting your role as CIO?
Dr. Stephanie Lahr: There are two elements to competition right now. It isn't just about high quality care — it's about a high quality personalized experience. We really keep our eye on the ball because we have a diverse population who have different thoughts, perspectives and abilities to interact with us, whether that's in-person or in a virtual world. We have to stay focused on that because if we don't, our competitors will.
The second element is that competition has gone virtual and it's more difficult to track, but if you Google "psychiatrist near me" just to see what comes up, do you know what comes up first? Do we not come up first? More recently, in high demand areas like psychiatry, we aren't coming up first. There are a lot of options and advertisements where you can have online access to a psychiatrist, maybe even the same day. We have to keep our eye on where that competition is coming from, how to manage that, and what we need to do to expand our footprint or change our footprint to meet community needs.
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