Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1251567
57 CIO / HEALTH IT The difference-makers during the surge: 6 CIOs on top priorities and key advice amid COVID-19 By Laura Dyrda T he U.S. health system is going through seismic changes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Across health systems, executives including CIOs have pivoted their focus to support their teams remotely and caregivers as they treat COVID-19 patients. Here, six CIOs from hospitals and health sytems outline their top priorities and share key advice for their colleagues amid the pandemic. Jeffrey Sturman. CIO of Memorial Health- care System (Hollywood, Fla.): My top three priorities are: 1. Enhancing and rapidly pushing out our exist- ing telehealth capabilities while also developing new ways to communicate with our patients. 2. Helping to coordinate consistent and con- stant communication with our patients and consumers via any and all technology means; that includes websites, text, email, bots, tele- phone and even manually while also helping to facilitate communications to our internal healthcare staff, through video conferencing and all other traditional means. 3. Designing automated screening, schedul- ing and results notification processes with our local, regional and state representatives in the testing of COVID-19. Key advice: We all need to remain extremely flexible in these uncertain times. We need to continue to do the 'magic' behind the scenes in keeping our systems up and running. We also need to be as proactive as possible, for example by addressing network bandwidth, and making sure what is typically not a re- mote working staff are able to do their jobs in a secure and effective way. We are used to running projects across our diverse settings. Our IT teams are oentimes helpful in coordinating and facilitating major initiatives. We are certainly in the midst of major activities with dealing with COVID-19 and IT can help keep things controlled. Final- ly, we are all in this together. We have a lot of highly qualified staff that can support those areas in our hospitals that are not traditional- ly IT functions, but in emergent situations we all can play a role. Tom Andriola. Vice Chancellor of IT and Data at UC Irvine (Calif.): Our top priorities are planning for the expansion and resiliency of services during the pandemic; keeping our employees safe; contributing our deep clinical expertise toward research and clinical trials around the virus. Key advice: I think people need to have ac- cess to as much information as possible in times like these. People tend to simplify things down to keep them manageable as well as to help them deal with the complexity and uncertainty. Giving people lots of opportuni- ties to hear information, ask questions and help connect the dots across the organization is always important as a leader. What's differ- ent right now is these two things; first, how rapidly the situation might change because of new numbers, a government decision, or the general uncertainty around COVID-19. We're literally dealing with a dramatical- ly changing environment every day, which makes planning extremely difficult. Second, it's important to help people with the chal- lenge of getting credible information. ey look to leadership and inherently trust that the information they're getting from us is both timely and accurate. We can't lose sight of that. So basically, it means doubling down on information sharing and creating oppor- tunities for conversation and learning. BJ Moore. Executive Vice President and CIO of Providence (Renton, Wash.): We are starting to see the benefits of the progress we have made standardizing our systems and tools, moving to the cloud and simplifying the environment. Having most locations on the same instance of Epic, for example, has been critical in helping us drive rapid response to changing needs. Having Office 365 and Teams rolled out to the majority of our caregivers has also made a big difference in our ability to maintain productivity. is togeth- er with improvements in network capacity and VPN are allowing us to enable work from home for a broad range of non-clinical users. Key advice: It is important to have strong leaders engaged across the board driving very intense coordination. In this kind of situation, it is very easy to have many well intentioned efforts at odds with each other which can result in waste of time and re- sources. It's important to have well-func- tioning command and control structures to manage the response. Also, having to enable business processes and roles that are traditionally performed at the office setting versus home has provided valuable insights for our device strategies, for example using laptops instead of desktops, and other key capabilities going forward. Laishy Williams-Carlson. CIO of Bon Se- cours Mercy Health (Cincinnati): Our top three priorities to support clinical operations include (1) rapid changes to our Epic instanc- es to build COVID-19 dashboards and regis- tries, build or configure repurposed inpatient care units, and support changes in accessing records; (2) deployment of technologies sup- porting new approaches to care, such as work- stations on wheels located in isolation rooms to provide caregivers a way to communicate with the patient from outside the room de- creasing use of personal protective gear; mo- bile technologies for patients to communicate with their families; and provider assessment of patients remotely, for example in a long- term care setting; and (3) rapid expansion of virtual visits including practice visits as well as hospital-based services such as physical or oc- cupational therapy. Key advice: [e biggest need for technology resources and budget to support caregivers is] additional mobile devices and new configura- tions to support constant innovation and new use cases. e partnership of clinical informat- ics and IT has never been more essential to assure we meet caregivers' needs. I would also like to commend many of our vendors who have stepped up to say 'what do you need' and have partnered with us to get equipment and assist us in building out solutions. Zafar Chaudry, MD. Senior Vice President, CIO of Seattle Children's: My priorities in- clude maintaining a stable and resilient re- mote working platform technology, the men- tal health of my employees, keeping clinical services supported so they can continue to take care of patients and pivoting to virtual. Key advice: COVID-19 is going to have a long term effect on how healthcare organizations look at their costs, how they shi delivery of care away from medical centers and how they pivot to virtual moving forward. Health- care systems must re-evaluate all aspects of how they deliver care and make sustainable plans to put cost improvement programs into place throughout all clinical and non-clinical areas. Healthcare systems should plan to re- duce back office costs, including IT, human resources and revenue cycle also. Tom Barnett. CIO of University of Roch- ester (N.Y.) Medical Center: Our top pri- orities tended to shi very quickly once