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38 CIO / HEALTH IT 5 of Epic CEO Judy Faulkner's most interesting thoughts about the future of healthcare By Jackie Drees A s CEO of EHR giant Epic, Judy Faulkner keeps a close eye on evolv- ing trends and innovations in the healthcare industry. 2020 saw digital health adoption skyrocket and a strong shi to virtual care thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Here are five of Ms. Faulkner's most interesting thoughts and quotes from 2020 about the future of healthcare: 1. Ms. Faulkner unveiled Epic's work on its new website, EpicShare.org, in November during Forbes Chair Steve Forbes' podcast. e website will allow Epic and non-Epic us- ers to share creative ideas since customers' ex- ecutives oen want to know what others are doing so they can replicate it. "We call that imitate to innovate," Ms. Faulk- ner said. "What we're saying is that it's good to have a chief innovation officer, but you really need a chief imitation officer to watch what others are doing and share." 2. During a Dec. 13 episode of former Sen. Bill Frist's, MD, "A Second Opinion" podcast, Ms. Faulkner highlighted the potential of ar- tificial intelligence in healthcare and how it is making an difference in clinical care. "I think where AI really works well is when there are so many things to think about that the human brain doesn't work as well as a machine. ere are many inputs — for exam- ple, the patient is deteriorating or has sepsis — that AI can alert healthcare givers to hours before they would have been able to recog- nize it on their own. And that's going to be saving a lot of lives — it already is." 3. On whether the pandemic has changed her outlook on interoperability and sharing data, Ms. Faulkner told CNBC's Bertha Coombs the following: "We were actually the originators of interop- erability. at was in the early 2000s, and it was because my husband, who's a physician, had a patient who was under good care, but she went with her family to another city. She got sick, she went to the emergency depart- ment, and she died. And he kept saying, 'If they had her record, they would have known what to do. It would have been easy.'" 4. Ms. Faulkner told Business Insider in April that she thinks hospitals and health systems in the future will standardize data definitions so regulators, such as the CDC, can more quickly access data needed for monitoring public health emergencies. "If people define the data differently, then you can't aggregate it. So that's a big problem that there isn't enough standardization. And just collecting the data when it isn't standardized doesn't get you very far," Ms. Faulkner said. 5. Because of the pandemic, Ms. Faulkner thinks IT deployments at health systems will become more efficient, she said during a Sep- tember Business Insider interview. She add- ed that her team has worked with providers during the pandemic to redesign the imple- mentation process to make it virtual and do the install faster. n CIOs foresee need for more tech investment in 2021 By Laura Dyrda T he shift to remote work and need for business-conti- nuity software during the pandemic mean CIOs have a strong case for boosting IT budgets and investments in 2021, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. "If you're not always planning for the future in technology, you're going to be left behind," said Maya Leibman, execu- tive vice president and CIO of American Airlines Group. The pandemic bolsters the case for spending on more tech- nology across industries, and in healthcare the need be- comes even greater to solidify virtual care and protect pa- tient information. Gartner, a technology research and consulting firm, esti- mates global IT spending will jump 4.3 percent in 2021 to reach about $3.7 trillion. Cloud-based IT infrastructure spending is expected to hit $64.3 billion in 2021, a 27.6 per- cent growth over 2020. n 4 EHR contracts, installs costing $100M+ in 2020 By Laura Dyrda H ealth systems continued to sign EHR contracts and deploy the technology in 2020 despite pandemic-related delays. Here are four health systems that signed or implement- ed EHR contracts worth $100 million or more in 2020: 1. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs deployed the first phase of its new $16 billion Cerner EHR Oct. 24, 2020 at Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center in Spo- kane, Wash. 2. Oklahoma University Medicine signed a $200 million contract to install Epic's EHR Feb. 3, 2020 after a more than yearlong search to find a new EHR system. 3. San Antonio-based University Health System began a $170 million EHR implementation in July 2020. 4. Buffalo, N.Y.-based Catholic Health deployed Epic's EHR in fall 2020 after signing a $100 million contract with the company in February 2019. n