Below is an excerpt from that conversation.
Question: How will IT and your teams change at El Camino Health in the next 12 to 24 months?
Deb Muro: We have to really change the mindset of the IT team because they may be presented with a new challenge every day. How do we culturally prepare for that? We have to be open to whatever the challenge of the day is, and how we deal with that is so important. This past year we were standing up COVID testing centers and doing mobile vans for testing, and that moved to mass vaccination clinics. My team has been doing things they’ve never done before, so I think creating that capability and openness to address any challenges presented is so important.
The second thing is around implementing technology. Historically, we think of just implementing new technology and once it’s installed, our job is done. In reality, that’s just when our job starts because user adoption, acceptance and usability is one of our key responsibilities. That’s a big change for an IT department. We’re working on that right now, and my goal is we’ll be more focused on usability than we will on implementation in the future.
Q: As you gain feedback from your organization about usability, what adjustments have you made to make the technology more user-friendly?
DM: This word is probably overused, but it’s a word that speaks the most about where I think we’re going: frictionless. Our organization is in the Silicon Valley, so we’re surrounded by startups that can do very frictionless types of technology in healthcare. We are not very frictionless right now. We ask a patient the same question multiple times, and it’s hard for patients to see their bills. It’s hard for patients to get their medical records.
We have to become more frictionless in the future so we are easy to work with. The interactions should be more engaging and enjoyable, so patients are interested in learning about their care because they have a great experience.
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