The CIO's role is ever-changing, and the pandemic has highlighted the need for a more strategic approach to data analytics and IT integration in the future.
At the Becker's Healthcare Health IT + Revenue Cycle Management Virtual Event on July 24, Vice Chancellor for Information, Technology and Data and Chief Data Officer of UC Irvine and UCI Health Tom Andriola and CIO of Phoenix-based Banner Health Deanna Wise outlined how IT leadership roles are changing and the most essential technology for the future.
Editor's note: These responses have been slightly edited for clarity and length.
Click here to view the full presentation on-demand.
Question: As your role continues to change, is there anything that you're preparing for now that you'll need 12 months down the road?
Deanna Wise: From our standpoint, the data analytics. We have to get further in our data and looking forward, not just looking backwards. We've had a good start to that, but one of the things we haven't done well, which is notable during the pandemic, is we haven't consolidated our information. While we all have our own information in our organizations and we have done some of the integration for interoperability, but we have to get so much better at it in healthcare in order to make a difference in the future.
Tom Andriola: I identify with Deanna's comments in terms of getting better at the integration. The other thing I would add to that, and I've been trying to talk to our leaders about the unique opportunity that we continue to have to position IT to be more strategic to the enterprise, is asking this question: How do we accelerate out of the curve. As organizations we've all come into a curve where you navigate the curve very carefully, but we will come out of the curve at some point and as we've seen during other economic slow-down periods, there is always tremendous competitive advantage opportunity if you can find a way to accelerate out of the curve.
You can see some of the leaders that we have from today's business world, in 2008 and 2009 represented an opportunity for them to shoot out ahead of everyone else and they are now dominating our economy. I'm asking that question for us as a healthcare system. How do we think about accelerating out of the curve while also keeping in mind that we have to be agile and keep up with what is going on in the community with the pandemic to radically thinking about how the world can and needs to be different for us moving forward.