Steven Hanks, MD, MMM, FACP, FFSMB, serves as Chief Clinical Officer for St. Peter's Health Partners of Trinity Health System.
On May 2nd, Dr. Hanks will give the presentation "Using Health IT to Improve Care Transitions and Communications" at Becker's Health IT + Clinical Leadership + Pharmacy conference. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place May 2-4, 2019 in Chicago.
To learn more about the conference and Dr. Hanks' session, click here.
Question: What do innovators/entrepreneurs from outside healthcare need to better understand about hospital and health system leaders?
Steven Hanks: We need products and services that ease the burden on caregivers and patients, and which have rapid, demonstrative ROI. We're living on razor-thin margins. Same goes for investments that have to come out of capital, which for most of us includes lease deals. The thing outside vendors need to understand is the decision-making timeline and hierarchy in healthcare, which is complex and ever-changing as the trend of mergers/consolidations continues.
Q: What one strategic initiative will demand the most of your time and energy in 2019?
SH: We're converting our entire system to Epic – IT overhauls tend to crowd out just about everything else but once we're done, we'll have a single instance of Epic across the entirety of our national health system, which will catalyze our ability to deploy machine learning, AI and advanced analytics to fuel our achievement of the quadruple aim.
Q: Healthcare takes a lot of heat for not innovating quickly. What's your take on this?
SH: Innovation works best and fastest when systems and processes are standardized, which, along with limited resources and the regulatory burden, have been what's slowed innovation in healthcare. There's a separate but related phenomenon in healthcare is the slow diffusion of new knowledge, which in part is a function of the fact that healthcare is still delivered primarily by highly educated licensed professionals, who differ in the pace at which they keep up with advances in diagnosis and treatment. The solution to that is more interdisciplinary and team-based care, combined with better leveraging of the IT investments we're continuing to make.