Digital technology and artificial intelligence is transforming health system operations and care delivery. It’s also upending IT teams.
CIOs and chief digital officers are racing to identify the right talent, skillsets and partners to succeed in the AI-driven healthcare landscape. Health systems are gathering more data than ever and striking the right balance between internally building products and partnering with outside vendors. They’re also restructuring to become more agile and efficient.
“Over the past three months, the most impactful change I’ve led has been restructuring and realigning of how our technical teams collaborate, improving interoperability across our healthcare systems to better align with our organizational strategy on integrated, patient-centered care,” Patti Cuartas, DMSc, executive director and associate CMIO of Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, told Becker’s.
The system recognized legacy siloed processes created inefficiencies and limited the ability to scale technologies systemwide. Dr. Cuartas partnered with colleagues in digital, clinical and operational teams to identify friction points with the EHR, focused on data sharing, decision-making and duplication. The group then improved Mount Sinai’s governance model to clarify ownership, streamline decisions and agree upon a shared objectives and key results model tied to strategic goals.
“We are on our way to not only improve data exchange and reduce duplicative efforts, but also to accelerate the delivery of key initiatives like better access to data, better quality referral workflows and seamless patient data sharing in a more unified approach to delivering high quality, connected care,” said Dr. Cuartas. “More importantly, it is positioning us to scale future innovation in a way that’s truly aligned with our mission and the needs of our patients and community partners.”
For some systems, the transformation is sparked by merging with another organization. Philadelphia-based Jefferson Health recently acquired Lehigh Valley Health Network and for the last several months, Luis Taveras, MD, chief information and digital officer, has worked on integrating the two IT departments to operate as a team.
“We’re engaged in every facet of the organization,” he said. “You look at all the projects that we have to integrate the IT organization, but we have to support the integration of every other department out there as well. It’s amazing to see the pivotal role we play in bridging the organization together.”
Creating a single culture from two legacy organizations is easier said than done. One of the key learnings Dr. Taveras found throughout the process is “you can’t do this in a vacuum.”
“We need to stay focused on one Jefferson. We can make investments and spend some resources in a single area where we have tremendous opportunities and results. But everything we have to do needs to be done with a big Jefferson lens in mind because it has to be that solution we bring to the market, that we bring to the organization, that is going to have a heavy impact on the entire spectrum of the enterprise,” said Dr. Taveras. “That doesn’t mean we don’t make point solution decisions and investments, but it has to be that the bulk of what we do is addressing the entire organization.”
Rady Children’s Health in San Diego is going through a similar transition after acquiring Orange County-based CHOC earlier this year.
“When you go through a merger, and not a lot of people have gone through the process before, there’s typically anxiety that teams have. What is it going to look like? Are we just merging teams? Are our roles going to change? What our approach with this has been is we really have to run these two different teams in parallel for a bit before we really begin to integrate them and merge teams,” said John Henderson, vice president and chief information and digital officer for Rady Children’s. “Our approach is to be very deliberate as we stand up different teams related to the merger integration activities. Then begin to bring leaders together and the teams together so we can begin to get to know one another and really rally around a common purpose.”
Both teams are coming together now to identify different technology platforms and identify the common platforms moving forward. Mr. Henderson went on a retreat with his direct reports to decide what the technology organization’s new identity will be. He asked his direct reports what the IT organization wanted to be known for.
“We landed on partnership, value and service excellence. That’s our identity,” said Mr. Henderson. “Now we’re working through that process with the rest of the leadership team and IT organization. We’ll solidify that, finalize it and then we start to build the underlying processes around how we do things differently to make sure that when our organization experiences us, that’s the feeling they walk away with; that they’ve had a partner and we’ve delivered value and excellence.”
Technology buoys operational changes at health systems as well. Johnson City, Tenn.-based Ballad Health recently implemented a new video platform, which required a cross-functional team to select the platform and roll it out. The team practiced collaborative decision-making to ensure the platform would benefit all stakeholders and ultimately be adaptable. The cross-functional team also mapped out the installation to minimize disruptions during the rollout.
“This attention to detail is critical to ensuring a smooth changeover, particularly in clinical and operational settings where workflow consistency is paramount,” said Penni Kyte, digital care strategy officer at Ballad Health. “Integrating the platform into our EMR system streamlines communication and data sharing, reinforcing the platform’s utility and ensuring that it supports clinical workflows seamlessly.”
The platform was built as a collaboration tool and is nimble to adapt to evolving needs within the organization, and future innovations.
“This flexibility is key in an environment where clinical and operational demands can change rapidly,” said Ms. Kyte.
Rady Children’s is also evolving based on technology: generative AI. The health system developed its own instance of generative AI and is starting to build products against the new infrastructure and data platform they’re putting together. A strong data platform where the team can access information will allow Rady Children’s to build successful models in the future for clinical and administrative applications. The organization leveraged existing talent and brought on new data engineers to carry out the project.
“There’s also some partners that we’re leveraging as well, and we brought on a new leader over data analytics about 16 months ago who came from the gaming industry,” said Mr. Henderson. “They’ve been incredible in leading this effort, and it’s really an integrated effort.”
The health system’s research data science group and hospital and data science teams, which previously operated separately, now both report into the new data analytics leader to architect the right platform organizationwide and continue to build products.
“It’s not one versus the other. The team is going to do it together. We really are building this together and working in a matrix partnership,” said Mr. Henderson. “For us, we’re not trying to control all the delivery and all the build. We want to make sure the right teams have the right capabilities to build the products that are going to be most effective.”