Leo Bodden was recently named senior vice president and CIO of Valhalla, N.Y.-based Westchester Medical Center Health Network, after having spent the previous 29 years in IT leadership roles for New York City-based NewYork-Presbyterian.
“Thirty years ago, when EMRs were becoming the thing, the objective was documentation,” Mr. Bodden told Becker’s. “As we get to the next quarter of the 21st century, the objective is going to be to leverage technology to minimize the cognitive burden on our providers — transitioning from that documentation, regulatory focus to allowing the technology to make their jobs easier.”
That can be done with AI, which Mr. Bodden said will be an “expectation” in healthcare in the next two to five years. To prepare to quickly adopt increasingly affordable AI solutions, he said he is “refocusing the organization on being more data-driven.”
The two mantras he’s shared with his team: “One is a human should never be expected to do what a computer can do. And the other one is a computer should never ask a human what it should already know,” he said.
WMCHealth is working to simplify things for staff by streamlining its EHR and enterprise resource planning systems.
The new ERP will standardize human resources, supply chain and finance functions, moving from 30 different systems to two or three. WMCHealth plans to finalize a decision there soon before embarking on a 12-to-18-month implementation. “I’m hopeful we’ll have the opportunity to automate a lot of fairly manual processes that we have today,” Mr. Bodden said.
WMCHealth also has two EHR vendors now but is exploring moving toward one, with a decision expected by the end of the quarter. “We have a pretty good idea where we want to land, but we haven’t fully executed on a plan,” he said. “There’s some work we still have to do.”