Innovation drives health systems, and changes in a health system's IT infrastructure can have dramatic effects on the CIO and digital officer roles.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced health systems and hospitals to innovate, and now CIOs are left with the difficult task of deciding which digital innovations are here to stay.
Becker’s reached out to CIOs and digital officers across the country to figure out their approach to digital health innovation. Here are three who responded.
Editor's note: Responses have been edited for clarity.
Robert Bart, MD. Chief Medical Information Officer at UPMC (Pittsburgh): Emerging from the pandemic, I think two things have become clear in healthcare. The first is patients have become more comfortable seeking care through digital self-service on their smartphones, as opposed to the traditional call center. The second piece is healthcare, like every industry vertical, has struggled with maintaining appropriate staffing. You hear a lot about staffing in the clinical space with nurses and doctors. The truth is large healthcare systems, like UPMC, there is a large nonclinical operational support staff that is required to run hospitals and clinics and a lot of that staff has been equally challenging to maintain. If you don't have efficient technology and you were previously relying on people to fill the gaps and you don't have people now, you need more efficient technology.
These are the two themes; it is about decreasing friction and access to care and improving efficiency through leveraging better technology. Combining those two, we have had a strong initiative at UPMC to aggressively simplify and digitize our access to care. The "simplify" process is that we have a large traditional centralized call center, large number of full-time equivalents involved, but if it's hard to maintain staffing then we need to transition to something that is digital self-service.
It can't just be digital self-service to decrease friction for the patient. It also has to be digital on the back end. It doesn't make sense to have technology that if you don't have enough people to answer phones, your new technology ends up creating work cubes that someone has to manually work. If I don't have enough people to answer the phones, I don't have enough people for the work cubes. I actually need to automate from the patient end, all the way to an appointment landing digitally on the schedule.
Michael Pfeffer, MD. CIO and Associate Dean of Technology and Digital Solutions Stanford Health Care and Stanford University School of Medicine (Palo Alto, Calif.): At Stanford Health Care, we're excited about the work our teams are doing to drive patient experience innovation. Digital health initiatives like our eConsult Program provide clinicians with access to advice from specialists via store-and-forward technology embedded in our EHR.
This enables our patients to get expert care in a few days rather than having to wait weeks for a specialist appointment via a traditional referral process. As a geographically dispersed academic medical center, we also see tremendous promise in our efforts to integrate telehealth functionality across the care continuum — allowing providers, patients and family members to seamlessly communicate and collaborate across care settings.
Claude Pirtle, MD. Chief Medical Information Officer and Assistant Chief Medical Officer of West Tennessee Healthcare (Jackson): The COVID pandemic has enhanced the speed of implementation and adoption of an enormous number of technologies in healthcare. At West Tennessee Healthcare, one pillar we have been focusing on is access to care and continuing to provide high-quality care through virtual means.
An exciting partnership we have made is with Tytocare. Our virtual care team has been working to place Tytocare units inside of our regional schools in an effort to allow the child to have seamless access to a clinician while in the classroom setting. Through this opportunity, we have continued to expand our services in multiple counties in Tennessee with plans to continue to grow. Over the past two years, this program has allowed children to seek high-quality care while in the classroom setting, saving parents time and anxiety.
The virtual care team is also evaluating the placement of these solutions in other care settings such as skilled nursing facilities, rehab facilities and other opportunities. Another suite of devices we are excited to offer is our remote monitoring and chronic disease management solutions. WTH has continued investments in this sector around COVID discharge monitoring, chronic heart failure monitoring, among a number of different chronic ailments. This has perpetuated a care paradigm change from a reactive to a proactive approach.