Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/821337
60 CIO / HEALTH IT some systems that have kept their trains run- ning for awhile on tracks where parts could be replaced. My gentle recommendation is to look for your soware and hardware upgrades." James Golden, PhD, Senior Managing Director of Healthcare Advisory and Healthcare IT Practice, PwC (Hartford, Conn.): "I don't think this is the time to trim. ere are always opportunities to optimize. But when I think about IT, IT isn't an add-on to a provider. It is central to a provider. I think it's just more about being thoughtful. We are watching many of our clients just start to do EMR adoption. It's hard and it's expensive, but it has to be done." Mick Coady, Principal, PwC (Hous- ton): "e rationalization of soware. I go into hospitals that range from $2 billion all the way up to $12 billion or $15 billion, and the portfo- lio of soware that sits on the shelf that they are paying 20 percent year-over-year maintenance on is mind-boggling to me. It's a reconciliation issue, but application soware is a huge spend in healthcare and they just haven't done a good job of managing it. ey could pick up a lot of money if they would jettison some of the lega- cies that have been sitting there." Jennifer Esposito, General Manager, Health and Life Sciences, Intel (Santa Clara, Calif.): "e same tool you might buy for clinical analytics or artificial intelligence, whatever it is, the same analytics package can certainly be used to improve your operational efficiency. One of the things I might suggest is some people gravitate toward single-use case solutions or an algorithm that solves a very specific problem — maybe its related to re- imbursement or a CMS penalty or something like that — but people really need to make sure that whatever they are doing can be lev- eraged more broadly in their organization." Christopher Tackett, Healthcare Indus- try Marketing Manager at Intel: "I would say the upside is the more you utilize analytics, the more you improve operational and clinical efficiencies, which will help you cut costs." Aaron Miri, CIO, Imprivata (Lexington, Mass.): "I've been a CIO and a CTO in a cou- ple of systems. What I would eliminate is the cost in overhead by manually worrying about duplicate medical records and not knowing who is coming in your front door. In my case I had several [staff members] who were man- ually sorting through medical records saying, 'OK does this baby girl look like this baby girl, even though they have two different, but simi- lar names?' … I would put in technology… to understand really what's going on, remove the clutter from your medical records so you're not worried about merging records down- stream, which costs more man hours. And then take that head count and put them on something like working on your EMR, work- ing with your physicians to get better coding." Heather Staples Lavoie, Chief Strategy Officer, Geneia (Harrisburg, Pa.): "ere is an opportunity, particularly as tools have ma- tured, to have fewer slice solutions. It provides better opportunity in terms of less cost from a licensing perspective and more value in terms of the solution [hospitals] are able to obtain. at's where they struggle. Vendor manage- ment is a challenge … It's hard to cut your IT budget because the needs at organizations are only growing. I think they also have an oppor- tunity to get a better return on investment for the investments they are already making." Bridget Duffy, MD, CMO, Vocera (San Jose, Calif.): "I'd cut redundancy and too many clicks from the EMR that are causing fatigue. ... I think IT should focus on stripping out the hassles from a doctor's or nurse's day. ey could cut out costs when they cut out the hassles and amplify the joy." Ben Kanter, MD, CMIO, Vocera (San Jose, Calif.): "Cardiac telemetry. Because there is a lot of evidence that says it is grossly overused, it is an enormous cost and provides no patient benefit for a large percentage of the patients that it's used on." Andrew Adams, Principal, Ernst & Young (New York City): "Population health soware tools. I think a lot of them turned out to not be very beneficial, and prob- ably aren't good investments until you've got your data governance under control. Really focus on your data governance." James Costanzo, Global Health Ad- visory Leader, Ernst & Young (De- troit): "To be completely transparent, many organizations have spent lots of money on building warehouses and building data marts and building all this stuff and they don't see the return on their investment because they haven't been able to take advantage of it. ey could continue to invest in data scientists and people who know this stuff and really drill deep in an- alytics, or they could work with firms like us or others that have already made that investment and are willing to do it as a service, and start to receive that return on investment that they've already made. I do not believe that they should stop focusing on analytics because it's critical." Frances Dare, Managing Director, Health & Public Service, Accenture (Ir- ving, Texas): "I would advise CIOs look at technologies that enable lower labor intensity. Healthcare is one of the most labor-intensive of all industries. ere are also things you can do to shi some of the work back to patients or consumers. ey can do some of their own self-monitoring or answer standardized ques- tions before an annual physical. E-visits take half the time of a traditional, in-person en- counter. So if I were a CIO trying to make a real difference for my health system, I would look at technologies that unlock labor capacity." Brian Kalis, Managing Director of Dig- ital Health and Innovation, Accenture (Minneapolis): "It's about rethinking to fuel growth and efficiency and quality all at once, but that requires a full reconfiguration, rather than just cost-cutting." Dave Dyell, President and CEO, Jel- lyfish Health (Panama City, Fla.): "I've seen most of our partners not necessarily in eliminating something, but trying to optimize what they have and really try to bring efficiency to it. at's probably a more practical approach. A lot of the organizations I've worked with, I don't see a lot of waste at. at concept of elimi- nating something I don't think is relevant." Randy Parker, Founder and Chief Busi- ness Development Officer, MDLive (Sunrise, Fla.): "Redundant and multiple vendors working inside their system to solve the same problem. Consolidation and unifica- tion of a platform. Not having multiple ven- dors all working with certain components of their problem. A lot of the systems who are looking at telemedicine may be dealing with three, four different vendors not communi- cating with each other on a unified platform. Condensing and consolidating of that effort to have a better outcome I think is critical." Keith Bigelow, Genera Manager of Analytics at GE Healthcare (San Fran- cisco): "Start at the macro level and look at waste. $3 trillion is spent on healthcare in the United States, $900 billion of which is waste. If I were to cut something from the CIO's bud- get, we should be looking to take cost out of your organization — it's full of waste." Bill Miller, CEO of OptumInsight (Eden Prairie, Minn.): "I would largely give the in- dustry credit for this, but I think everybody has to look at their operations and determine, 'Do I have to be in absolute control of all my opera- tions?' ere are companies that can scale and do things at a lower cost. Look at where you are redundant and where somebody who has built scale could do better. Look for redundancies and look for companies that can create efficiencies just because they've concentrated their efforts and technologies in a means to do that. We fol- low that rule internally ourselves; there are some things we don't do that third parties do." Suzanne Travis, Vice President of Reg- ulatory Strategy at McKesson Technol- ogy Solutions (Alpharetta, Ga.): "I rec- ommend they outsource the revenue cycle. at would be my advice for anything that is not their competency. Outsourcing things like the revenue cycle are great things to do right now. [Hospi- tals] need to focus on care quality; why not shi the burden of dollars and cents to somebody equipped to do that?" n