From new EHR implementations to digital health strategies and data analytics initiatives, CIOs and health IT executives at health systems plan to focus on big projects next year.
Here, five health IT leaders discuss their biggest focus in 2020.
Phyllis Teater. CIO of The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center (Columbus): In my role as CIO, I will spend most of my time in the strategy space and building a vision and structure for implementing that strategy to help achieve our goals. We have a fantastic team that is readily able to execute on initiatives and also work with our business leaders to ensure execution meets our operational goals. In addition, I help to break down organizational barriers when they stand in the way of execution.
Leo Bodden. Vice President and CTO of NewYork-Presbyterian: I can't ignore the amount of effort that it will take to transition from nine EMRs to one. If we were to expand on the things I mentioned already, we are also kicking off a major transformation initiative as an organization. We are working with Accenture to formulate a plan for transform care end-to-end. We dubbed the initiative "Imagine" because we want our people to think about healthcare, were it structured in the right way, what would they "Imagine" it would be?
When I think about Imagine, technology is front and center, then alignment. We need to align the people, processes and technology to ensure a consistent patient experience, whether we are providing that experience in telemedicine, services at one of our hospitals or clinic visits.
Kristin Darby. CIO of Envision Healthcare (Nashville, Tenn.): In 2020, we are focusing on solutions that position us to deliver an enhanced digital experience to our clinicians. I believe that every digital experience should be personalized to each clinician's preferences and interests while still easy to adopt for the more than 25,000 Envision clinicians working in more than 1,000 different sites of care.
My vision is to make it easier for clinicians to focus on what matters most — caring for patients — and make sure that when they are tasked with something, it is at the appropriate time and with context that is actionable. As a leading medical group, we provide clinicians with valuable tools and resources that improve efficiency, support clinical excellence and enable them to maximize both the quality and quantity of time they have to engage directly with patients.
Jeffrey Sturman. Senior Vice President and CIO of Memorial Healthcare System (Hollywood, Fla.): It's always a fine balance that you have to strike to keep the lights on and maintain operations with whatever else you see as the more strategic areas of the system. One area that will take a lot of energy in the coming year is looking at our ERP and figuring out what we need to do from an investment standpoint. We need to either stabilize it or we need to look for new opportunities to jump on.
I plan to spend more than 50 percent of my time on more strategic relationships and new implementation activities, enhancing our consumer engagement will be top of mind for me. From a recruitment and people standpoint, I will continue to focus on getting know my IT team, the healthcare system, and our vendor partners better – enlisting all of their support in helping to move to a different level of consumer engagement.
I will also spend time thinking about what we need to focus on and optimize the systems we have.
Jason Williams. CIO of CHA Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center (Los Angeles): My focus will be primarily on the stabilization and optimization of our IT and EHR systems, and on the adoption and operation of systems that are geared towards patients.