Becker's Hospital Review

46 CIO / HEALTH IT What Cleveland Clinic looks for in the ideal IT team member — it isn't just technical knowledge: Q&A with CIO Ed Marx By Laura Dyrda E d Marx is a veteran in the health IT space and currently leads the IT team at Cleveland Clinic as CIO. He has previous experience as senior vice president and CIO of Texas Health Resourc- es in Dallas/Fort Worth and spent more than two years as executive vice president of the Advisory Board while also providing IT lead- ership to NYC Health + Hospitals. Here, Mr. Marx discusses what Cleveland Clinic looks for when hiring new IT team members and the vision to keep team members engaged. Editor's note: Responses have been edited light- ly for length and clarity. Question: What has been your No. 1 priority in building a strong IT team? Ed Marx: Finding individuals with charac- ter and competence. ese are the founda- tion stones to build trust. Add in diversity of thought, life and experience. Next, I am in- tentional on relationship building. I set quar- terly external activities that include partners and kids, and monthly external activities just to catch up socially. Q: What qualities do you look for when hiring new team members? What does the ideal candidate's back- ground and experience look like? EM: Empathy and service passion. Finding individuals who have empathy. Finding peo- ple who desire to serve. Finding people who want to make a difference with their lives. With this foundation, you can build an amaz- ing team. It has less to do with experience or tech- nical know-how. It is all about desire and empathy. Q: How do you keep your best team members engaged? EM: Vision. Engagement begins with hiring well in the first place. ings I already men- tioned like empathy and passion and service and competence and character. en you give them the "why." e compelling call to action about why we do the things we do. It really comes down to meaningful work. Teams are engaged when they believe the why and know their contributions lead to something bigger than themselves. Q: What are you doing to compete with oth- er healthcare organizations and IT compa- nies to attract and retain the top talent? EM: We don't really think about competing with other organizations for top talent. We believe leading with our vision and culture helps us attract that kind of people we desire. If someone is driven primarily by salary, they won't be a good fit. Once you are part of our team, we will invest in you. Every caregiver (employee) has a develop- ment plan. We have a rock star HR division with many resources to help everyone get to the next level of their capabilities and grow their career. Inside of IT we have formal mentoring programs and numerous adjunct intensives. Everyone learns Agile. Everyone gets certified in IT Service Management (ITIL/ITSM). Everyone spends time with cli- nicians. What keeps caregivers here goes back to what I shared earlier: having a compelling vision that answers the why and serving in a culture where patients are first, and every caregiver is treated as family. n EHR intervention teams may help reduce clinician burnout, study finds By Jackie Drees A team-based intervention approach to improve EHR use and efficiency may help alleviate burdens that physicians report feeling when dealing with com- puter-based clerical work, according to a recent study published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings. Aurora, Colo.-based UCHealth researchers developed a two-week "Sprints" EHR intervention, which was led by an 11-member team trained to help clinic staff make the EHR more user friendly. The team comprised one project man- ager, one physician informaticist, one nurse informaticist, four EHR analysts and four trainers. Sprints interventions had three main components: train cli- nicians to use EHR features more efficiently, redesign the clinic's multidisciplinary workflow and create new special- ty-specific EHR tools. Sprints are completed as a two-week process. Sprints were conducted at six UCHealth clinics between January 2016 and July 2017. Sprints leaders met with clin- ic officials 90, 60 and 30 days before the Sprints interven- tion to identify EHR frustrations. Clinicians participating in Sprints interventions were surveyed on their EHR satisfac- tion pre- and post-intervention on a net promoter scale ranging from -100 at the worst to +100 at the best. Researchers reported the results of clinicians' surveys from six clinics. Clinician satisfaction with the EHR increased from -15 pre-Sprints intervention to +12 post intervention. The percentage of clinicians who reported burnout prior to the intervention decreased from 39 percent to 34 per- cent after the intervention. While study authors concluded that Sprints interventions can help improve clinicians' EHR use, they also recog- nized various limitations of the study, including lack of a standardized instrument to measure EHR user experience and the Sprints' intervention evolution at each clinic, thus resulting in slightly different experiences for each physician. n

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