In collaboration with CHIME, Becker's Hospital Review's "Life of a Healthcare CIO" series features leading hospital and health system CIOs from across the country who are sharing their experiences, best practices and challenges.
To recommend a CIO to be featured in this series, please contact Helen Gregg (hgregg@beckershealthcare.com).
An interview with Wes Wright, senior vice president and CIO of Seattle Children's Hospital. (Interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Question: You've been CIO since August 2012. Has your job changed since you began, and if so, how?
Wes Wright: Well, it's changed substantially from the CTO role I had for four years prior to becoming the CIO. For one, you don't get the instant gratification you get as a CTO because you don't get to play with the "toys" as much as you got to as CTO.
[From when I started as CIO] not much has changed in my responsibilities or what I thought my responsibilities were going to be, but I have noticed the rest of the executive staff becoming more and more cognizant of the importance of IT in the new care model.
Q: In your time with Seattle Children's, what has been your biggest accomplishment?
WW: By leaps and bounds, my biggest accomplishment over both my CIO and CTO timeframe has been the implementation of virtual desktop infastructure at Seattle Children's.
For the clinicians, it gives them more time with their patients and less time with the IT. The goal is to make the IT transparent in patient-provider interactions, and this got us one step closer. Not perfect, but closer.
For the non-clinician folks, it sped up time-to-application, so they're not waiting for patches to load or systems to boot up. Now, 45 seconds and they can start their day.
Q: What do you see as your biggest misstep or mistake?
WW: One particular project springs to mind, and that is trying to integrate a home care app into the rest of our system. Trying to fit the proverbial square peg into a round hole. We learned a lot of lessons, and learned when it's time to call a project failed and move on to the next one.
So, we have a home care division, and they operate as a little health system themselves. They have a supply chain, clinicians, dialysis, those kinds of things. There are only a couple of vendors out there that service this area. We chose one, and collectively decided to integrate that piece of software with our revenue cycle software and the rest of the clinical software. In and of itself not a bad idea, but we decided we would do it by cutting into the middle of the software stack rather than just use interfaces. So the output of the software stack would be the input. Theoretically, that's a better way to do it, but in practice it turned out to be incredibly complicated and destructive to that software stack.
Then the vendor got bought by another vendor and that vendor got bought by another, and it made us go, "OK, let's stop and approach this again at a later date, and learn some lessons." So that's where we're at now.
Q: In the past month or so, what project has taken up the majority of your time?
WW: We are in the beginning stages of the standup of a pediatric health information exchange. First it will be for Seattle, then western Washington, then we want to move it out to Alaska, Montana, Idaho, Hawaii.
That's been the majority of my time, and it's been interesting because it's not my technical time, it's with my CIO hat firmly in place. I'm thinking about what is the best strategy to deploy this from a clinical perspective, and then what is the best strategy to deploy this from a political perspective, and then third what is the best strategy to deploy this from a [technically] successful perspective.
It will be a unique offering from most HIEs. Consent requirements and so forth cut out a significant portion of the pediatric population, so we have to figure out how we will work around consent and age issues so that's taken up quite a bit of my time. And it's not time spent in IT, it's more spent with my peers in legal and nursing and our CMIO. It's really a fascinating project.
Q: What is the biggest challenge you're facing right now?
WW: If the life of a healthcare CIO had only one "greatest challenge," it would be easy. There are always multiple greatest challenges. One of those would be the new cost environment. With the new care models in place, narrow networks have thrown a monkey wrench into the business operations, especially with some of the networks offered on the insurance exchanges. [Editor's note: In October, Seattle Children's filed suit against Washington state's Office of the Insurance Commissioner, alleging the vast majority of plans offered in the state's insurance marketplace do not provide coverage for services at Seattle Children's.]
We're also developing a clinically integrated network, which is a two-prong challenge. From an IT perspective, the CIN will be a customer of the HIE, so we have that challenge to make sure the HIE works so we can stand up the CIN and make it work for the patients and providers. I'm also on the planning committee for the CIN, and from that perspective it's about population health metrics and care management plans and those types of things.
So really, the big challenges aren't what most people think of as traditional "IT challenges." They're the same challenges the hospital president would say are his challenges, or the CNO or even CEO.
Q: What is one lesson you've learned during your career that you'd like to share with other CIOs?
WW: The biggest lesson I've learned was from Drexel DeFord, my previous boss and now the CEO for Next Wave Connect, though he probably got it from someone else. [Editor's note: Drexel DeFord served as CIO of Seattle Children's from 2008 to 2012 and as CIO of Scripps Health in San Diego from 2006 to 2008, and in both positions was Mr. Wright's supervisor.]
The first thing you have to do to be a successful CIO or CTO or anything is to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you, and then really listen to those people. But realize at the end of the day it's your decision and your responsibility.
The problem is there are so many people who are smarter than me, it's hard to weed them out. [Laughs]
The other is to focus on the data. Data is the key. Data is both the danger, in terms of security, as well as the strategic differentiator. It's not the IT, it's the data the IT brings.
More Articles in the "Life of a Healthcare CIO" Series:
The Life of a Healthcare CIO: Sanford Health's Arlyn Broekhuis
The Life of a Healthcare CIO: UPMC's Dan Drawbaugh
The Life of a Healthcare CIO: Penn State Hershey's Rod Dykehouse