Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1489485
33 CIO / HEALTH IT how it adapts to the changing digital healthcare landscape. Bradd Busick, senior vice president and CIO of Tacoma, Wash.-based MultiCare Health System, said he and many of his peers are watching to see how Epic quickly adopts new features while learning from niche competitors. "Ranging from [customer relationship management], unified messag- ing or a 'lightweight' retail health offering for urgent care, we would love to see additional investment and speed to market to replace many healthcare systems' best-of-breed or one-off point solutions," he said. Epic has a "long history of innovation," the company spokesperson said. "For example, we invented interoperability with minimal effort (Care Everywhere). And MyChart — the patient portal with data from the EHR," the spokesperson said. "Because we are soware developers and love our products, we focus on customer happiness to make sure our customers love the products too." Tony Ambrozie, senior vice president and chief digital officer of Coral Gables-based Baptist Health South Florida, said he doesn't view Epic's market share as dominant, just the largest at the moment. And he said it can all change if a company opts to "extract supernor- mal rents from its position" and doesn't continue innovating. He said successful EHR vendors must be open and interoperable, pro- tecting customers from "exclusive and comprehensive lock-in." ey'll also have to compete with all the new digital, artificial intelligence, machine learning and sensor technologies arriving in healthcare. "In the '70s and into the '80's in IT, the closed dominant platform was the IBM mainframe while Unix (and later derivatives) were open," he said. "We know how that turned out."n Memorial Sloan Kettering CIO leaves for Hearst By Giles Bruce A tefeh "Atti" Riazi, the former senior vice president and CIO of New York City-based Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, has been named CIO of Hearst. She starts Nov. 1 and will report to Mahendra Durai, the media company's senior vice president and chief technology officer. "I am inspired by Hearst's stirring mission and will do all I can to leverage technology for transformational results on behalf of the corporation, its clients and consumers," Riazi said in an Oct. 27 Hearst news release. "After meeting some of my new colleagues, I knew immediately I was going to be part of something special — an organization with a deep culture built on customer delight, innovation and the core values of its employees." Prior to joining Memorial Sloan Kettering in 2020, Ms. Riazi served as assistant secretary-general and chief information technology officer of the United Nations beginning in 2013, CIO of New York City Housing Authority from 2009 to 2013, and as a global CIO and senior partner at advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather. n Google Cloud, Epic partner; Hackensack first health system to migrate EHR By Giles Bruce G oogle Cloud and Epic have reached an agreement to enable health systems to migrate their EHRs to the cloud, while Edison, N.J.-based Hackensack Meridian Health will be the first organization to do so. The partnership between the tech giant and leading EHR vendor will help facilitate health systems' digital transformation, giving them access to analytics and artificial intelligence services that aim to boost patient outcomes. "We expect running Epic on Google Cloud will be simpler for our IT and developers and will allow them to focus more on uncovering creative ways to improve patient care," said Kash Patel, executive vice president and chief digital information officer for Hackensack Meridian Health, in a Nov. 14 Google Cloud news release. "Having everything with Google Cloud will provide a huge opportunity for discoveries. For example, data from our AI avatar for natural language processing will already be in Google Cloud, ready for us to ask questions. This will speed up our work and make information more accessible." Google Cloud and Hackensack are also collaborating on a "healthcare data engine accelerator" project to improve equity, patient flow and value-based care, as well as an artificial intelligence imaging tool. "With our Epic EHR on Google Cloud, we'll be able to innovate faster, and benefit from a more efficient and secure cloud environment," stated Hackensack CEO Robert Garrett. n e partnership between the tech giant and leading EHR vendor will help facilitate health systems' digital transformation, giving them access to analytics and AI services.