After nearly 30 years of experience in healthcare — an era that saw the advent of the internet, the beginning of wireless communications and the mass implementation of EHRs — Ed McCallister, senior vice president and CIO of Pittsburgh-based UPMC, believes now is the most transformative time for IT.
He explains that consumer behavior and expectations are shaping technological advancements across industries — from smartphones to self-driving cars.
"Demanding consumers expect to have information, services and products at their fingertips, upending industry after industry," Mr. McCallister says. "It's not hard to see that healthcare is poised for dramatic transformation."
Mr. McCallister was named senior vice president and CIO at UPMC in 2014, where he now leads a team of more than 1,500 information service professionals with that same vision: to transform clinical care and customer service through technology.
But Mr. McCallister sees his job differently than the average CIO. To him, the traditional role of the CIO is dead.
"While managing legacy applications, security and infrastructure are still essential and the foundation on which our success is built, today's CIO must also be a strategic advisor and innovator in every aspect of the business," he says, adding that CIOs today should "challenge the status quo every day and be prepared to foster 'constructive disruption.'"
Before Mr. McCallister took the CIO post at UPMC, he served for 15 years — first as director, then vice president and CIO — at UPMC's insurance division, where he helped build the systems to support the hospital's customer service and population health platform.
Mr. McCallister recently spoke with Becker's Hospital Review on trending technology and the challenges health systems face implementing it.
Note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: Why did you decide to focus your career on health IT?
Ed McCallister: Technology has always been a deep interest of mine, but when you combine technology with the impact it can have on people’s lives in the healthcare setting, technology becomes not just a career, but a passion.
Q: What are a few health IT trends you want to learn more about?
EM: In this digital age, natural language processing, artificial intelligence and machine learning are key to unlocking the power of data. These technologies will not only give us the right answers to our questions, but also provide insight into the questions we should be asking in the first place. Through our commercialization arm, UPMC Enterprises, we are making significant investments in these and other transformative technologies and partnering with leaders like Microsoft to apply them to the quality, cost and access challenges we face in healthcare.
Q: What is one of your main IT goals for UPMC this year?
EM: Our primary goal this year is to continue our efforts to transform the consumer experience. With patients increasingly taking an active role in their healthcare, we are accelerating our efforts to use technology to deliver a personalized, coordinated and connected UPMC experience. One example is our deployment of biometric readers and self-service kiosks in our hospitals and clinics to positively identify and register patients for their appointments. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. We envision the day when a patient walking into a doctor's office or hospital is immediately recognized, without any check-in, and directed digitally to the right room and services.
Q: In recent years, what has been your biggest IT challenge and how did you overcome it?
EM: As a $16 billion-and-growing healthcare system, with more than 30 hospitals and 3,800 physicians, our integration work is never done. We are expanding at an unprecedented rate across the state, including the recent additions of [Harrisburg-based] UPMC Pinnacle and [Williamsport-based] UPMC Susquehanna, which creates an exciting IT challenge: how to harness our petabytes of data — clinical, genomic, financial — to personalize care and improve the patient and health plan member experience. By partnering with our clinicians and data scientists, we've made significant strides in developing clinical pathways to more effectively treat diseases, understand our costs and make better decisions for patients.
Q: Many health systems are moving toward the cloud. How has UPMC leveraged this technology?
EM: At UPMC, we have moved to a hybrid model, which combines the private and public cloud. For our on-premise data environment, we are moving some of our operations this fall to a new Tier 3 data center near Pittsburgh, where we will be the anchor tenant for our partner, Involta. UPMC recognized several years ago that we did not need to build, own and operate this facility ourselves. Instead, we are deploying our capital on what we do best — world-class healthcare and insurance services.
Editor's note: Involta is an IT provider that partnered with UPMC to create an on-site data center solution.
More articles on health IT:
Becker's celebrates National Health IT Week
October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Top 15 cybersecurity stories so far in 2017