From greater investments in technology to improve productivity to investments in new in cybersecurity technology, here, five health system CIOs and IT leaders share how they are using their IT budgets now and through the remainder of 2022.
Editor's note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity.
Linda Stevenson, CIO of Fisher-Titus Medical Center (Norwalk, Ohio): Besides cybersecurity, we are focusing on solutions that improve productivity and reduce cost. This is imperative now with the challenges we are facing with hiring and retention.
Eric Jimenez, CIO of Artesia (N.M.) General Hospital: Our health system is investing in cybersecurity technology, new data center equipment and possible EHR technology.
The new cybersecurity technology helps protect our patient information. Since we are a rural health system, we can't attract security talent to our area, so we leveraged technology to help us manage our cybersecurity threats. It is a nice mirror of artificial intelligence and people working together.
Due to COVID-19, we delayed the rebuilding of our data center. The delay helps us look at all possible avenues. Do we move to the cloud, stay on-premises or hybrid? We met with a lot of vendors and educated ourselves on the benefits. We ultimately decided on the hybrid model and will put some workloads in the cloud and some on-premises.
Tom Barnett, Chief Information and Digital Officer of Baptist Memorial Health Care (Memphis, Tenn.): We are continually in the process of renewing and replacing our technical infrastructure, but we are also focused on collaboration and productivity technologies at the moment in order to create an optimized work experience for our remote employees.
Also, as most healthcare organizations over the last decade addressed electronic medical records, the new focus is on enterprise resource planning and workflow automation systems. We are investing in this to ensure we are running the best system for finance, supply chain, human capital, etc.
Robin Parkin, Chief Information and Technology Officer of UVA Health (Charlottesville, Va.): We are investing in tech that is patient facing digital and outside provider facing to improve workflows with our health system.
Brett Mello, CIO and Chief Information Security Officer of Kingman (Ariz.) Regional Medical Center: We are spending in four areas: security, patient engagement, analytics, integration/data sharing.