Foreseeing the change in the workplace is necessary for employers, so a healthcare leader explains what challenges are coming over the next two years.
Dusadee Sarangarm, MD, serves as the chief medical information officer at Albuquerque-based University of New Mexico Health.
Dr. Sarangarm will serve on the panel "Patient Experience 2.0: How to Reach Patients in 2023 and Beyond" at Becker's 7th Annual Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Annual Meeting: The Future of Business and Clinical Technologies. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place Oct. 4-7 in Chicago.
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Question: What are you most excited about right now?
Dr. Dusadee Sarangarm: Healthcare is in a time of tremendous change. Out of turbulent times, we often see epic technological and innovation strides. Due to current disruptions, I'm eager to see what human ingenuity will uncover in the next few years.
Q: What challenges do you anticipate over the next two years?
DS: The workforce is in transition and experiencing many different market forces. We're changing how we work, where we work, who does the work and how much people expect to be paid for it. People and society also have higher expectations of employers around diversity, equity and inclusion; right now, they have choices. I anticipate employers who don't keep up will be kept out from getting the best people. This translates to a highly competitive market for hiring qualified staff or retaining them for a fleeting moment, just enough time to catch and release, which obviously has a stressful impact on the bottom line for most health systems.
Q: Where are the best opportunities for disruption in healthcare today?
DS: Any changes subtracting steps from the clinical workflow would be an immense opportunity, technological or process changes. It seems all we do is add steps in the form of more documentation requirements, rules which don't make sense, and superfluous box-checking — none of which patients care about, which begs the question, why do we do it?
We want better care for humanity. We aren't going to get there by asking our nurses to document one more thing, our coders to query one more phrase, and our providers to take one more regulatory training on an obscure ruling. We must rethink what is truly necessary to take better care of people, like meaningful human interaction, an engaged workforce and less time doing stupid stuff. Only then can we take care of more people, learn more medicine and fewer rules, and find meaning in caring again.
Q: How is your role as a CIO evolving? How are IT teams changing?
DS: The CMIO role a decade ago centered mainly on moving paper processes to electronic ones (i.e., documentation and order entry). Now CMIOs are leading the rollout of entire EHRs for health systems, as well as new bolt-ons like telehealth platforms, patient apps, secure text messaging and artificial intelligence tools. Our role has become logarithmically more complex as we continue to manage the EHR design at our institutions while at the same time shaping the strategic decisions of some of the largest acquisitions for a health system. As such, we are integrated into the C-suite more than we have previously. In short, 2012 CMIOs were a nice-to-have. In 2022, we are an absolute necessity if a health system wants to keep one of its most expensive assets, the electronic health record, in good condition.