healthsystemCIO – Strategies for Hospital IT Leaders

Welcome to healthsystemCIO’s interview with Dr. Mustafa Yousif, Director of Digital Pathology, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology, at Michigan Medicine. Dr. Yousif has been at the forefront of a groundbreaking digital transformation in pathology at Michigan Medicine, leading efforts to implement a comprehensive digital pathology system over the past 24 months. In […] Source: Ro...

Welcome to healthsystemCIO’s interview with Dr. Zafar Chaudry, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital and Information Officer at Seattle Children’s. In this conversation, we dive into Seattle Children’s journey to modernize their ERP system, exploring the rationale behind this transformation, the decision-making process that led to choosing Workday, and the unique strategies employed to optimize...

In a recent interview with Anthony Guerra of healthsystemCIO, Kaleb Harris, Research Director at KLAS, discusses the importance of selecting the right partner for go-live support. Harris emphasizes the critical role that consulting services play in ensuring successful EHR activations, particularly in high-stakes environments involving major vendors such as Epic, Oracle/Cerner, and Meditech. The co...

Health systems are struggling with major financial headwinds that have shrunk already thin operating margins. IT can and must take a multi-pronged approach to help organizations pursue the Quadruple Aim -- reducing costs, improving population health and patient experience, and improving team well-being. First off, IT must look internally at its own budget to make sure any bloat is removed; secondl...

CHIME’s policy wonks are reveling in the details of healthcare IT-related regulations and laws (all in varying stages of promulgation) so you don’t have to; that’s the message from the organization’s VP of Public Policy Mari Savickis. But what she does need from members is the willingness to keep CHIME up to date on just […] Source: Cybersecurity, Telemedicine & AI Some Key Items on CHIME’s Policy...

Help desks are being inundated with cyberattacks, most of which are parried, a few of which find their mark, but all of which impact productivity and service. Why? Because agents on high alert must take more time to verify identity before they can even listen to a complaint. So what's a health system to do? What policies can CIOs and CISOs put in place to help their help desk agents protect the en...

There’s a ton of information in the EHR, but if clinicians have to spend their precious time digging around for it, the benefits can be lost. KLAS recently decided to take a look at a set of vendors focused on making it easier to surface such data. In this interview with healthsystemsCIO, Jackson Tate, Research […] Source: KLAS Looks at Vendors Aiming to Help Clinicians Get the Most of of their EH...

Health system executives are faced with a dizzying kaleidoscope of constantly evolving privacy regulations, making compliance a full time job that spans multiple roles. In this interview with healthsystemCIO Founder & Editor-in-Chief Anthony Guerra, Teresa Burns, Director of Privacy Operations and Privacy Officer with Protenus, suggests strategies for staying up on what’s going down, as […] Source...

“As we understand the things we want to do from a front-end perspective, the backend becomes mission critical,” said Anika Gardenhire of Ardent Health Services. In this interview, she talks about the importance of a solid infrastructure – especially with AI initiatives, her leadership philosophy, and the true goal of innovation. Source: Q&A with Anika Gardenhire, CDIO, Ardent Health Services: “Inn...

Considering doctors and nurses constitute the lifeblood of a health system — and any workforce report will show they are in short supply — it follows that they must be treated with the proper support and care. So when other reports come out revealing many are struggling with burnout, healthcare executives must ask why, and look to ameliorate any part they may be playing in it. For healthcare IT ex...

For CIOs, perhaps the most important objective is to provide a great experience for clinicians “without overloading on technology,” according to Michael Carr. In this interview, he talked about the bold initiatives at Health First that he hopes will move the organization toward that goal, and what it means to be a high-reliability organization. Source: Q&A with Health First VP and CIO Michael Carr...

In this interview with healthsystemCIO’s Anthony Guerra, Bob Schlofelt, Executive Director and CISO at Valleywise Health, discusses: His experience in multiple industries; Why healthcare is up there with the most difficult industries to be a CISO (hint: because every doctor is another boss); Why the fact that many health system physicians are not employees makes […] Source: Q&A with Bob Schlotfelt...

The best way to alleviate the documentation burden is by developing “tools that can help support nurses and create efficiencies.” The problem is that “we don’t have time right now to provide input,” said Victoria Tiase. In this interview, she talks about how digital transformation has affected nursing; the question vendors need to be asked; and how Utah Health is bringing innovations to the bedsid...

It sounds simple and it makes sense – to ease the burden on clinicians that comes with logging into multiple systems, and thus improve patient safety, all data should reside in one place. When it comes to imaging, that means all images, regardless of how they were created or where they are currently housed (think […] Source: Q&A with Tampa General Hospital’s Senior Director of IT Enterprise Imagin...

It makes perfect sense – study what your adversaries are doing and plan your defenses accordingly. If they’re coming in the windows every time, perhaps you don’t need to keep adding locks to the door. And studies have been done in healthcare showing there is a typical attack profile that often entails moving from a […] Source: Q&A with Intermountain Health VP/CISO Erik Decker & Director of Endpoin...

To deliver the kinds of experiences patients expect, a healthcare system must act as just that—a unified system. This ideal system breaks down when patients are asked to re-enter their information with each care encounter or staff lose time dealing with cumbersome and repetitive processes that keep them from practicing at the top of their licenses. IT executives have the power to smooth these poin...

In today’s complex healthcare environment, providing a platform for users to present ideas is essential. However, “if it’s open-ended and unbounded, we’re going to be building a whole bunch of very pretty bridges to nowhere,” said David Sylvan, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer at University Hospitals. Instead, “we have to be prescriptive about what we’re going to solve for,” he said. Source: Q&...

Like any risk measure, the level of insider risk in a health system is never static, despite the fleeting comfort a snapshot might provide. Thus, it's helpful for security and privacy professionals to contemplate the reasons spikes occur so mitigation measures can be implemented at the right time and place. For example, if we consider that issuing new user credentials increases risk (at least unti...

The pressures that go along with leading cyber in a healthcare institution are daunting; some of which include the need to be perfect all the time, the fact that the industry is under almost constant attack, and the presence of financial margins that don’t leave IT with money to burn. Of course, combine all that […] Source: Q&A with United Musculoskeletal Partners CISO Krista Arndt: “Investing in...

The recent rash of ransomware-induced outages has truly created a "not if, but when" dynamic for health systems. And with that feeling must come a commitment on the part of all leaders to ensure their organizations can continue safely treating patients and maintaining critical business operations during such an ordeal. To do that, downtime plans need to be revisited, tabletops conducted, and playb...

In a perfect world, the only thing imaging professionals would have to consider is how to improve clinician workflow and thus, satisfaction, along with patient safety. Of course, the world is far from perfect, as demonstrated by healthcare’s shrinking margins. So those professionals must do their part to keep the enterprise as robust as possible. […] Source: Q&A with Duke University Health System...

Application rationalization is one of those thorny projects -- absolutely necessary and extremely challenging. It's absolutely necessary because millions of dollars are potentially being wasted on applications that are little used, if at all, while their mere existence increases the cyber attack surface. And it's extremely challenging because, even though leveraging data to understand which apps s...

The only way to solve the many problems plaguing physicians is by involving those who “understand the work, understand the problems, and live them every day, and partnering them with technology experts.” In this interview, Eve Cunningham, MD, Chief of Virtual Care and Digital Health at Providence, talks about her team’s objectives, the clinical support decision tool that could change the game for...

   The community hospital market is struggling with razor-thin margins, according to John Gaede, CIO, at San Juan Regional Medical Center; the result of increasing payroll and technology costs, along with the sunsetting of pandemic-related government programs. CIOs, he says, are in the critical position of making sure every dollar of those technology costs is […] Source: Q&A with SJRMC CIO John Ga...

AI has the potential to address dozens of efficiency challenges that health systems must solve in order to flourish in today's world of staffing shortages and increased burnout. As such, there is no lack of requests by users to interject it into this or that workflow. In many instances, however, the problem with moving forward is a red light put up by IT due to security concerns. But it doesn't ha...