Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1482786
83 CIO / HEALTH IT for soware-as-a-service applications. He said its data is about half on-premise and half in the cloud. An effective collaboration Mr. Smith said he's proud of the health system's partnership with health tech company Eon, which uses computational linguistics to identify patients at risk of lung cancer. LifePoint has an equity stake in the firm. "We have some great success stories of where we have found potential cancer, have gotten people in early for treatment and they were treatable, that probably would have gone unrecognized for a long time and been a much bigger deal," he said. "So it's been a great thing in terms of patient satisfaction, it's been great from a quality or an outcome perspective, and it's more than paid for itself, which is kind of the trifecta. ere are a lot of things I work on that don't pay for themselves. You can draw a hard line to a hard [return on investment]. And this is one where we can really check all three boxes." In the current economic climate, Mr. Smith said CIOs are "all being asked to do more with less." He's been revisiting vendor contracts to see if they're still needed and focusing on retaining talent. "Many of us are seeing, especially when you get into the cybersecurity and the technical realm, they can work for Google, they can work for lots of places," he said. 'Inward-focused innovation' Mr. Smith has also worked to digitize internal operations to make them run more efficiently, through enterprise resource planning systems or EHR applications to increase nurses' productivity, for example. He calls it "inward-focused innovation." In the future, he said health systems will be going toe to toe with "the Amazons" and "the Googles" of the world: "Everybody's looking at healthcare saying, 'How can I take a piece of this pie?' We're gonna have to be more creative and compete against people that we didn't compete against in the past. And some of them are really savvy from a tech perspective. Google, as an example, is really savvy, probably a lot more than Cerner or Epic — so how do you compete with those?" In health IT, "we used to talk about a five-year strategic plan," he said. "You can create one, but it's going to be shelf decoration fairly fast." So hospitals will have to figure out how to automate, cut down on wasteful spending and get providers practicing at the top of their licenses, all while rolling out new initiatives in areas like urgent care, telehealth and digital pharmacies, he said. "We're going to continue to have to look at new care models that we didn't have to look into in the past," he said. "Exactly what that's gonna look like? My guess is as good as anybody else's. But as smart people at the top of the organization operationally figure those out, my job is to figure out how do I support them and how do I make it come to fruition." n UC San Diego Health CIO: 'Patient, provider satisfaction is a driving force' behind health IT decisions By Naomi Diaz P atients have greatly benefited from the disruption that technology and digital transformation have had on the healthcare industry as they now have better access to data and more control over their healthcare experiences. As a result, CIOs are prioritizing investing in and creating digital technologies to sustain patient loyalty through better engagement and satisfaction. Becker's spoke to Joshua Glandorf, CIO of UC San Diego Health, about his goals for the remainder of the year and the trends driving IT transformation decisions. Question: Where are your overarching objectives and goals for the remainder of 2022? Joshua Glandorf: For the remainder of 2022, it's focusing on our cloud migration. That means establishing a team and getting it up and running so that we can be a cloud first organization. Additionally, we are continuing to work on developing our digital footprint and digital front doors in terms of remote patient monitoring. We're analyzing how we're managing patients in their care in a remote fashion and how we're keeping our patient population satisfied. We're also continuing to advance our technology around communication with our patients. We're using tools such as two way SMS text and analyzing what kinds of communication patients prefer, whether they want a phone call, email or text message. Lastly, we're focusing heavily on predictive analytics, AI and machine learning. We rolled out a number of different models to help us understand how we can provide better care for our patients and how we can better interact with our patients. Q: What are some trends driving transformation decisions in healthcare IT? JG: I would say satisfaction, both from the patient side, and the provider side. We're constantly thinking about how to provide a better product and experience for our patients. And on the provider side, we're looking at how to reduce clinician burnout. From an IT standpoint we're working on trying to make physicians' lives a bit more enjoyable. For example, trying to prevent hours and hours of charting in electronic medical records and using innovative pipelines such as ambient voice to capture things that are happening in the room so it doesn't have to be written down. n