In 2012, Pankaj Jandwani, MD, became the first CMIO of MidMichigan Health in Midland.
Since then, he has helped the health system convert to a single EMR, launch a telehealth program and implement an enterprise data warehouse. Here, Dr. Jandwani discusses the key lessons learned during those initiatives and where he is focused for the future.
Question: What initiative are you most proud of having led or participated in as a CMIO?
Dr. Pankaj Jandwani: I was fortunate to be part of the very first big-bang implementation of EMR at MidMichigan health in 2010. EMRs have since been cited to be the top cause of physician burnout in our organization. Poor usability from the then-available technology, on top of MU mandates, forced me to seek out and learn more about informatics, and become board certified. We have now converted to a single EMR and have a strong team of educators and leaders who share my passion to eliminate every barrier and obstacle with the use of healthcare IT. Result: Over one-third of our providers have saved an hour or more per day since our last EMR conversion two years ago, contributing to over 30 percent reduction in provider burnout since 2017.
I am also extremely proud of our team building our telehealth program. Starting with just five video visits a year in 2015, our program has now grown to be amongst the top five programs in the state by volume of video visits. Result: Our admission medication reconciliation is at 99th percentile (Epic Community Hospitals) with 24/7 pharmacy assistance with medication history and over 350,000 miles of travel avoided by our patients and families for specialty consultations for stroke, neurology, behavioral health, high risk maternity, infectious disease, etc.
Q: How has your role evolved over the past 12 to 24 months and where do you see it headed in the future?
PJ: As the first CMIO for MidMichigan starting in 2012, my primary task has been to ensure safe use of technology and promote adoption as we expanded implementations and conversions to a single EMR throughout our health system. Meaningful use, clinical decision support and provider documentation improvement have been the buzz words in my world as a CMIO until last year.
Over the last 12 to 18 months, my priorities have been implementation of an enterprise data warehouse, especially for population health, integration of communication tools with the EMR as well as educating our teams on data sciences, process and performance improvement. We have a strategic initiative to reduce unnecessary variation in care process and outcomes. This has motivated us to explore and judiciously implement predictive analytics, improve our data governance and expand our interoperability with community resources, including partners like United Way, to help address social determinants of health with better coordination of care.
Q: What are the two to three biggest trends in healthcare affecting your decision-making process as a CMIO?
PJ: 1. The active role of community health systems in improving health of our communities while transforming and adopting to value-based care reimbursement. Other factors include population health workflows, analytics around cost and utilization, integration with community organizations, big data analytics around social determinants of health and genomics.
2. New technologies using NLP and artificial intelligence bots leading to predictive decision support, machine learning and integrated data science solutions ultimately accelerating process and performance improvement to help us achieve high reliability in healthcare.