Duarte, Calif.-based City of Hope has “an opportunity to reimagine” its technology strategy to improve the patient experience for years to come, its new digital chief told Becker’s.
Simon Nazarian was named executive vice president and chief digital and technology officer of the cancer center in September, having previously worked in IT leadership roles at Optum and Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente.
Becker’s caught up with Mr. Nazarian to ask about his hopes for his new position and the broader trends and challenges affecting the industry.
Question: What are your plans and goals for the new role?
Simon Nazarian: My goal for my new role is to continue advancing City of Hope’s mission to make hope a reality for all touched by cancer and related serious illnesses. My plan is to continue building and advancing our technology capabilities so that we can offer even more patients access to the latest treatments, innovative clinical trials and evidence-based supportive care.
We have an amazing amount of data and knowledge on the hundreds of different cancer types that exist and our patients’ diverse care journeys. My goal is to enhance our ability to glean meaningful insights from this data so we can improve care, enhance prevention efforts and improve the overall patient experience.
Q: What unique perspective are you bringing to the role having worked for a variety of industries (from Optum and Kaiser Permanente in healthcare to Sony Pictures and Toyota)?
SN: In every role that I’ve ever been in, I’ve always had to consider how the end user will benefit from my work. Regardless of the industry, that doesn’t change. However, in this case, the end users are patients and their providers, so I get to draw on all of my experience to find ways to provide tangible benefits to them.
I’ve worked in a variety of industries, but after transitioning to healthcare in 2008, I never left because I’m deeply passionate about the impact technology can make in people’s lives. If we put patients at the center of everything we do, good things happen and solutions present themselves.
I’ve also learned by working across multiple industries that having a new leader provides an opportunity to reimagine how we do our work. When you’re new to an organization, you have a unique perspective and an obligation to “bring the outside in” and help your team evolve. Our strategy should not be based on how we’ve done things in the past. It’s built on where we want to go as an organization and what is our vision to get there.
Q: What is different about leading technology strategy for a cancer center?
SN: In many ways, healthcare can be transactional. That’s just not a good approach when it comes to cancer, which is an all-consuming diagnosis and requires a collaborative, integrated approach to deliver the best possible outcomes.
City of Hope is particularly different because of its emphasis on whole-person care. We’re known for our evidence-based supportive care program, which is incorporated into every treatment plan across our network, easing the physical, emotional and psychological burdens of life-changing diagnoses like cancer for every patient we touch.
As somebody in technology and digital innovation, that presents a number of opportunities to improve the overall patient experience. This can include everything from better infrastructure and workflows to improve patient scheduling, to how patients connect to our supportive care services to leveraging AI to help doctors evaluate and summarize records for new patients. The goal is to not only improve outcomes, but to improve the overall experience and help patients thrive. This drives our technology strategy. It boils down to how we provide tangible benefits through the solutions we develop and deploy.
In addition to the patient experience, we also help our researchers. We are an independent academic institution with locations and groundbreaking research happening across the U.S. Our national presence provides us with a broad dataset, and when you combine that with City of Hope’s entrepreneurial spirit, it gives us the opportunity to function like an incubator and accelerator for all kinds of new technologies that help patients.
Q: What is the biggest challenge for healthcare technology leaders these days?
SN: The biggest challenge is striking a balance between an organization’s fiscal and technology needs. Costs of care and research are escalating and we continue to see lowering rates of reimbursement and funding. Meanwhile, the appetite for advanced technology continues to grow. These factors require us to prioritize investments and find ways to do more with less.
As a nonprofit, our patient’s interests are always at the forefront, even as we face the need to focus on standardized systems and efficiency. We prioritize developing collaborative partnerships with like-minded organizations to help us realize our vision. We are also enormously grateful for our philanthropic programs. They are the engine that allows us to cut through the bureaucracy often experienced by academic organizations, accelerating research discoveries that lead to cures.
Q: What do you think will be different about your job five years from now?
SN: What will be different five years from now is the velocity by which we create impact. What would have taken us years to build just a couple of years ago can now be built in a fraction of the time. Because of advancements in our core technology and AI and machine learning, we’re able to truly enhance the impact of our research and the care we deliver.
