Becker's Hospital Review

47 CIO / HEALTH IT The top 2 areas of focus for Mount Sinai South Nassau's CIO: Mobility and interoperability By Laura Dyrda M att Runyan, CIO and vice president of IT at Oceanside, N.Y.-based Mount Sinai South Nassau, is split- ting his time to make sure the COVID-19 vaccination process runs smoothly at the hospital while maintaining testing sites. But in 2021, he plans to focus more on stra- tegic communications, mobility and interop- erability to boost efficiency and operations at the hospital. He joined the Becker's Health- care Podcast to discuss the most important IT projects at the hospital. Below is an excerpt from the podcast, lightly edited lightly for clarity and length. Question: What are your top priori- ties today? Matt Runyan: My priorities have really shi- ed to vaccine distribution. We're still doing COVID-19 testing sites, building pop up sites, and we are part of the operations of the busi- ness and community health piece of it. You have to be agile about building things quick- ly both from an EMR perspective and regis- tration perspective to get people in with the vaccine now that it is being distributed. at is going to grow for the first six months until you can get everyone vaccinated that wants a vaccine while still maintaining testing centers so people can make sure they're safe. As more people get vaccinated, more things will open up, which adds the possibility of additional spread. You want to make sure you have those testing centers open. e main priority I have had here at Mount Sinai South Nassau has been around interop- erability and mobility. With the way technol- ogy has changed, getting hospitals off pager systems and using the technology of a mo- bile phone more as a device that can be used by clinicians to provide patient care. An ex- ample would be: now a lot of hospitals have "wireless on wheels" technology. ey have pagers to page doctors or nurses or rapid re- sponse teams and medical teams. We are transitioning that to the mobile phone because a lot of EMRs have a mobile path that syncs into the EMR that one would use to document. It's going into a room and instead of bringing a "wireless on wheels" into the room with an attached scanner to scan the wrist band, you now can use a phone to scan the wrist band. It has applications on it to show who the clinical support team is, who the care team is, what specialties are on call in the hospi- tal for that specific time. Prior to that, the process was to call down to the switch board and have a specific physician paged, ask who is on duty for rapid response and do a rapid response overhead using mass communica- tion soware to reach these folks. Because it is group based, even those who are not on call and may be off or out with their fami- ly are still getting that notification, which in some cases creates anxiety … rough these mobile applications, we are only contacting those who need to be contacted and who are on call within the hospital to respond. Q: What are you excited about? MR: Building on the base technology. In 2020, we weren't doing a lot of project work. We focused on putting in a base infrastruc- ture that will tie in our security cameras to our real-time location services to badging to make sure that going forward as we start add- ing functionalities, such as mobile phones, and they all tie in. We wanted to start with a great foundation like any large building or any type of structure. e better the founda- tion, the more functionality and interopera- bility you can build onto it. When people come in to make a purchase, it comes through IT. IT is a big part of the pur- chasing process to say we understand they need a product, but here is a like product that better fits into the interoperability we want to build here. It's not always about replacing old technology with the exact same brand of the original product. Let's buy one that will fit into the overall infrastructure and founda- tion that we built. is will allow us, in real time, services and mobility to where we are much more agile in how we even put patients on floors. For example, there is a lot of built- in telemetry; that means when patients come in certain medsurg rooms, they have to go into a specific room. With mobile telemetry made by the same manufacturers, any room can become a telemetry room, not just one where it's built into the wall. n Optum to buy Change Healthcare in $13B deal: 5 details By Jackie Drees N ashville, Tenn.-based data analytics firm Change Healthcare will com- bine with UnitedHealth Group subsidiary Optum in a deal amounting to about $13 billion, Bloomberg reported Jan. 6. Five details: 1. The acquisition will merge Change Healthcare with Optum to offer software, data analytics and other services to healthcare clients. 2. UnitedHealth will pay $25.75 per share in cash, a 41 percent premium over Change Healthcare's Jan. 5 closing price of $18.24. With Change Healthcare's more than $5 billion in debt, the deal amounts to $13 billion. 3. Change Healthcare CEO Neil de Crescenzo will lead the combined business unit as CEO of OptumInsight, the companies said Jan. 6. 4. OptumInsight is the smallest business unit by revenue under Optum; the division accounted for about $2.8 billion in revenue in the three months end- ing Sept. 30, 2020, according to the news release. In the same period, Change Healthcare reported $765 million in revenue. 5. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2021. n

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