Becker's Hospital Review

23 INNOVATION 'It is about decreasing friction': CIOs and digital officers on innovation By Noah Schwartz I nnovation drives health systems, and changes in a health system's IT infrastructure can have dramatic effects on the CIO and digital officer roles. e COVID-19 pandemic forced health systems and hospitals to innovate, and now CIOs are le with the difficult task of deciding which digital innovations are here to stay. Becker's reached out to CIOs and digital officers across the country to figure out their approach to digital health innovation. Here are three who responded. Editor's note: Responses have been edited for clarity. Robert Bart, MD. Chief Medical Information Officer at UPMC (Pittsburgh): Emerging from the pandemic, I think two things have become clear in healthcare. e first is patients have become more comfortable seeking care through digital self-service on their smartphones, as opposed to the traditional call center. e second piece is healthcare, like every industry vertical, has struggled with maintaining appropriate staffing. You hear a lot about staffing in the clinical space with nurses and doctors. e truth is large healthcare systems, like UPMC, there is a large nonclinical operational support staff that is required to run hospitals and clinics and a lot of that staff has been equally challenging to maintain. If you don't have efficient technology and you were previously relying on people to fill the gaps and you don't have people now, you need more efficient technology. ese are the two themes; it is about decreasing friction and access to care and improving efficiency through leveraging better technology. Combining those two, we have had a strong initiative at UPMC to aggressively simplify and digitize our access to care. e "simplify" process is that we have a large traditional centralized call center, large number of full-time equivalents involved, but if it's hard to maintain staffing then we need to transition to something that is digital self- service. It can't just be digital self-service to decrease friction for the patient. It also has to be digital on the back end. It doesn't make sense to have technology that if you don't have enough people to answer phones, your new technology ends up creating work cubes that someone has to manually work. If I don't have enough people to answer the phones, I don't have enough people for the work cubes. I actually need to automate from the patient end, all the way to an appointment landing digitally on the schedule. Michael Pfeffer, MD. CIO and Associate Dean of Technology and Digital Solutions Stanford Health Care and Stanford University School of Medicine (Palo Alto, Calif.): At Stanford Health Care, we're excited about the work our teams are doing to drive patient experience innovation. Digital health initiatives like our eConsult Program provide clinicians with access to advice from specialists via store-and- forward technology embedded in our EHR. is enables our patients to get expert care in a few days rather than having to wait weeks for a specialist appointment via a traditional referral process. As a geographically dispersed academic medical 7 health system collaborations with Amazon, Google, Microsoft By Giles Bruce B ig Tech companies including Microsoft, Google and Amazon have been making headway in the healthcare industry through partnerships with hospitals and health systems. Here are seven collaborations reported by Becker's since Aug. 25: 1. NYC Health + Hospitals partnered with Microsoft AI for Health and others Sept. 19 as part of the AI4HealthyCities Health Equity Network, which employs data science techniques to shed light on the main drivers of cardiovascular disease. 2. Winston-Salem, N.C.-based Novant Health is working with Microsoft to increase health equity, its tech leader told Becker's Sept. 15. 3. Duarte, Calif.-based City of Hope is using Microsoft for cloud storage and development, its CIO told Becker's Sept. 15. 4. Brentwood, Tenn.-based LifePoint Health partnered Sept. 13 with Google Cloud to improve its healthcare data analytics and interoperability. 5. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is looking to purchase Amazon Web Services' Red Hat and ENCOR training for staff to better equip them for its EHR migration to Oracle Cerner, according to a Sept. 9 government notice. 6. Wyoming, Mich.-based University of Michigan Health- West and West Orange, N.J.-based RWJBarnabas Health in West Orange, N.J. are among the health systems using Microsoft subsidiary Nuance's engagement solutions to increase patient reach and improve communication with patients, the company said Aug. 31. 7. Waterbury, Conn.-based Saint Mary's Hospital said Aug. 25 it is using Google Assistant as part of "serenity suite" to support staff resiliency and wellbeing. n

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