Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1203108
26 INNOVATION How CIO Myra Davis defined a culture of innovation at Texas Children's Hospital By Jackie Drees S ince assuming dual responsibilities of CIO and chief innovation officer ear- lier this year, Texas Children's Hospi- tal's Myra Davis has streamlined innovation efforts at the Houston-based health system. Ms. Davis, who was appointed chief informa- tion and innovation officer in February, first joined Texas Children's in 2002 as a customer support director. She has since taken on var- ious IT leadership roles within the organiza- tion, including vice president of information services and senior vice president and CIO. Here, Ms. Davis shares the strategy she imple- mented to tackle the wide berth of innovation initiatives occurring across Texas Children's and how she spearheaded opportunities to produce more growth. Editor's note: Responses have been lightly edit- ed for clarity and length. Question: How did your role change when chief innovation officer be- came part of your CIO title? Myra Davis: When I was appointed chief in- formation and innovation officer, or when the extra 'I' was added to my title, it became ap- parent that I really needed to define what in- novation meant; not just in the terms of add- ing it to my title, but more importantly, how can I assist the organization with the term being part of my title? Our President and CEO Mark Wallace ensures we understand that innovation is everyone's responsibility. ough, you can imagine, if innovation is ev- eryone's responsibility and I have the word in my title, it deserves a level of clarity to ensure that innovation is not immediately perceived as being only my responsibility. Q: How did you define 'innovation' and all that the word entails? MD: After I became CIO and chief innova- tion officer, I went on a discovery for about four months to understand what innova- tion meant to our organization. During this time, I interviewed many Texas Children's executives, senior leaders and board mem- bers to discuss the meaning of innovation. What I learned was that innovation took on so many different meanings across the organization; anywhere from change to the creation of medical devices to commercial- ization to leveraging existing technologies and owning companies. I received a wide variety of definitions, but when I looked up the root word of innovation, it really means to make change. rough this journey, my innovation team and I learned that there was a lot of great ac- tivity already happening in the organization; there were grant-supported partnerships focused on creating devices that were in the process of receiving FDA approval. ere also was, and still is, great work happening in ma- chine learning and partnerships beginning with startup companies. So, it's not like things weren't happening, but what we realized aer completing this discovery period was there was no centralized way to compile all the ac- tivity that was going on to present it and mar- ket ourselves to show that we are doing great work in the world of innovation. Q: What inspired you to start the Tex- as Children's innovation hub? MD: e innovation hub is really designed to aid everyone who is innovative within the organization by providing them a place to go to share ideas or problems, so we can collec- tively brainstorm opportunities for solving those issues. is is important because the problems we have don't always necessarily warrant the creation of a commercial device to be solved. e solution could be something as simple as leveraging an existing technology to improve a workflow. e hub was created to generate thoughts, and it's bidirectional in that it also works externally outside of Texas Children's with startups and incubators to share and seek opportunities we may have or want to con- sider investing in. It also allows us to share problems that we have and see if our partners have heard of companies that have already addressed and solved the same issue before. Q: How do you get your team into an innovative mindset and on board with digital transformation? MD: About two months ago we created an innovation advisory group, which consists of senior executives and physicians. We are educating the group on all the initiatives that have been happening at Texas Children's based on what we learned from our innova- tion discovery period. Getting our team on board with innovation and digital transformation is an incremental process. First, it is really changing the culture to welcome an innovation hub that is estab- lished to facilitate the innovative thinking of members of the organization. Second, we also look to ways that we can disrupt ourselves and vet new ideas in an expedited way. We have not yet mastered that, but the innova- tion hub is a mechanism by which to do that. And third, to make sure we're always having the foresight to see what possibilities, wheth- er those ideas come from internal or exter- nal sources, and opportunities we have with leveraging data. Q: What are the biggest obstacles you face when deploying a new tech/ innovation initiative? MD: Understanding that with some of this you must inherit some risk. But that's something we want to tread carefully in understanding how much acceleration of the vetting process we really want to miss or skip to reach the possibility of looking at solutions. Risk inheritance is something we're paying attention to because our brand speaks volumes to us and rightfully so be- cause of our mission. e other obstacle revolves around data. Our data is an asset, and as an organization of our size, we also recognize there are not many pe- diatric startups. We have mountains of data that is rich enough for startups to want to work with us, but we must figure out how to monetize that to ensure we're protecting the data and we're working with the right part- ners moving forward. Q: What do you consider as the big- gest deal breaker when evaluating vendor partnerships? MD: Cybersecurity is really big for us; it's a significant deal breaker. is is a new space for us, and we want to make sure that the partnerships we create are meaningful in that there is viability in solutions and ideas that are being vetted. We want to create solutions to those ideas, so that's important as well. In some cases, if it is a startup, we definitely want to vet the company or organization to make sure it fits our culture. Q: If you could eliminate one of the healthcare industry's biggest tech- nology struggles overnight, which would it be?