Becker's caught up with technology executive Daniel Barchi, CIO and group senior vice president NewYork-Presbyterian, to discuss the primary initiative he will focus on next year and what greatness looks like when it comes to the people he works with.
At the 10-hospital system, Mr. Barchi is responsible for IT, pharmacy, analytics, artificial intelligence and telemedicine.
Question: What do innovators/entrepreneurs from outside healthcare need to better understand about hospital and health system leaders?
Daniel Barchi: I have worked in the military and in a Fortune 50 technology company — healthcare is by far the most complex industry I know of.
Q: Name the one strategic initiative that will demand most of your time and energy in 2019.
DB: NewYork-Presbyterian is already the national leader in artificial intelligence and telemedicine, and in 2019 our focus will be scaling both. AI and robotic process automation will grow to impact more of our back-office IT and financial processes, and we will grow our telemedicine encounters far beyond 100,000 annually to make a meaningful impact on physician efficiency and patient experience.
Q: Healthcare takes a lot of heat for not innovating quickly. What's your take on this?
DB: Healthcare leaders are focused first and foremost on the safety and outcome[s] of our patients. It's not rocket science, but it is brain surgery. As a result, we will embrace technology that makes the clinical care process more efficient and produces better outcomes, but we are very methodical about applying new technology to patient care areas.
Q: Tell us about the last meaningful interaction you had with a patient.
DB: I am proud as a non-clinician that the work my team and I do has a direct, positive impact on the lives of many patients. We see it in each of the programs we develop. In 2017 we created NYP On-Demand Second Opinions to digitally connect patients across the country to our outstanding Columbia and Weill Cornell physicians. Hundreds of patients now take advantage of the service when they have a bad diagnosis and would like a second opinion from a world-class specialist.
Earlier this year, a patient from Minneapolis took advantage of our program after she was diagnosed with breast cancer and told by her local care team that her best option was to make final arrangements and seek palliative care. When she was connected to Dr. Keith Hentel at Weill Cornell Medicine, she learned that he was a world class-specialist [in] diagnostic radiology and that he felt that her cancer was treatable. The second opinion led to treatment, and she is now in remission. This was one of thousands of telemedicine and digital encounters our clinicians have weekly, but for this one patient it was life-altering.
Q: Can you share some praise with us about people you work with? What does greatness look like to you when it comes to your team?
DB: Greatness is not glamorous, nor is it always visible. Greatness in the clinical technology world is the storage engineer who builds and maintains a rock-solid storage array for medical imaging. Greatness is the analyst who keeps following up with the physician until the EMR is optimized to their workflow. Greatness is the desktop support engineer walking the hospital hallways at 2 a.m. to ensure that a major upgrade has gone smoothly for end users.
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