https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidchou/2023/02/20/5-focus-areas-for-healthcare-cio-and-cdo/?ss=cio-network&sh=1b8f41f74984

5 Focus Areas For Healthcare CIO And CDO

The healthcare sector is struggling under tight margins and the situation shows no signs of improving. Reimbursements for Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) physician fee schedule have been decreasing. Despite CMS initiatives to facilitate higher reimbursements for inpatient services, they are still failing to keep up with the rising costs of compensation and inflation, according to the American Hospital Association (AHA).

As a result, organizations are drastically cutting back on budgets—putting the CIOs and CDOs (Chief Digital Officers) in a particularly delicate position to get the right priorities set.

Healthcare has been spared significant layoffs, unlike big tech organizations recently. however, if things don’t turn around soon, that may change.

Here are five areas of focus for healthcare CIOs and CDOs.

Basic Digital Experience Is Still Struggling

Healthcare’s patient/customer experience is still off the mark compared to other industries–like retail, finance and airlines—despite improvements. Making a medical appointment and finding availability is not as easy as booking a flight. Understanding the potential cost for a healthcare visit is not as simple as a retail transaction in a department store.

For instance, a family with multiple children often has difficulty scheduling an appointment to have all their kids see the pediatrician at consecutive time slots due to most scheduling programs being designed for only one patient per time availability.

Another example is a healthcare clinic can charge $200 to the patient’s insurance company for a patient visit, but this doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll receive that full amount back in reimbursement. The exact rate of compensation is usually determined by negotiations between the clinic and insurer prior to any services being rendered.

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CIOs must explore and implement tools to assist with enhancing the patient experience instead of waiting for their electronic medical record vendor to do it all, which may be the easy solution but a harmful strategy at times.

Training a Digital First Mindset

The digital skill gap is a rising concern in healthcare organizations, mainly due to the number of disparate software products throughout an organization.

To ensure proper usage and management of these tools, there must be an emphasis on training employees on how they are used and operated. Generally, technology training only occurs during employee orientation or when products are launched; however, it has been largely neglected.

The average mid-enterprise health system in America consists of 250+ applications alone. Large enterprises have over 500 different applications, making tech literacy all the more important for staff members.

Aaron Miri, chief information and digital officer of Baptist Health, focuses on immersive design. Miri said in an interview, he is creating “Hands-on labs, formal reeducation (cert programs, etc.), Leveraging your key vendors to help cross train, working to educate your exec team with skilled partners such as in the example of cybersecurity, the FBI or DHS, etc.”

Automate All

CIOs and CDOs must take the lead on digital initiatives and concentrate on external patient-facing experiences and internal employee experiences.

In order to progress with administrative and receptive tasks, automation tools have become essential for departments such as supply chain, HR, and finance, with the following examples.

• Automating the supply chain helps to reduce waste while increasing productivity and efficiency for your staff by streamlining processes such as stocking, tracking, and replenishing internal goods.
• They are leveraging AI-driven HR automation to address and mitigate the risk of employee burnout.
• Assist pre-authorization and simple claim denials.

Seattle Children’s Hospital’s chief information and digital officer, Zafar Chaudry, is placing his bet on automation. Zafar said in an interview, “With the escalating costs in healthcare and margins continuing to drop, IT will be instrumental in enabling cost improvements with hot areas being automation, AI, RPA, and better use of cloud-based analytics to help change processes and improve throughput.”

Co-Creation Is The Play For Healthcare Provider Innovation

Healthcare organizations must think creatively with new affiliations and partnership models to meet the strategic needs and financial demands in the current evolving market environment. We are not a software development team, so let’s stop trying to act like one.

To best support your hospital or clinic, CIOs and CDOs should explore practical ways to collaborate with early-stage companies and find unique solutions for your patients. For example, I recently created a for-profit entity dedicated to innovative practices to co-create with venture studios or individual companies. This type of collaboration introduces new products in the industry.

Don’t Sleep On Your Infrastructure

After witnessing Southwest Airlines’ infrastructure go down last December, technology executives must keep their infrastructure, including security solutions, updated. At the same time, progressive organizations also focus on incorporating 5G solutions. I have always wanted to utilize 5G as an extension or replacement of my wireless network infrastructure.

Stanford Healthcare’s chief technology officer Christian Lindmark also has the same mindset by exploring 5G/CBRS for their new facilities and buildings. Christian said in an interview, “I still think many of the healthcare workflows are two to four years away, but now is the time to start investing in the infrastructure, especially if you are building a new facility or doing any renovation. We have identified a few workflows we hope to start testing in the next six to nine months.”

Overall, CIOs and CDOs alike will no doubt face immense pressure from their already tight budgets if the current situation worsens in the healthcare industry. Follow these five focus areas to be a successful CIO/CDO of the future – your organization’s future may depend on it!

https://www.magazine.medicaltourism.com/article/greening-technology-and-medical-equipment-research-for-a-greener-future

Kudos for Stanford Hospital’s many technical innovations

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/cloud-projects-are-powering-forward-health-system-cios-on-cloud-spending-amid-economic-pressures.html

Christian Lindmark. Chief Technology Officer of Stanford Health Care (Palo Alto, Calif.): We see increased spending in our cloud environments annually and predict it will continue to accelerate in fiscal year 2023 and beyond, for both software as a service (SaaS) and public cloud. Stanford Health Care recently completed a data center consolidation project, moving from five data centers to two co-location facilities and increasing our footprint in the cloud. This is consistent with an overall trend in healthcare, with most organizations determining that owning and operating data centers is not cost-effective or efficient. Furthermore, many vendors in the healthcare space are providing SaaS solutions, eliminating the decision of on-prem versus the cloud.

Historically, when we have looked at our production environments migrating to the cloud, the total cost of ownership has overwhelmingly been more expensive on a five- to seven-year comparison — with capital costs for on-prem hardware and operating costs for management not being reduced enough to offset the increase in operating costs related to cloud spend. However, these comparisons are getting closer each year.

We have found the greatest value in native cloud deployments is with internal software development efforts and disaster recovery environments. The market is still in an early stage, and it will take a few years for some of the greatest benefits for healthcare to emerge, specifically around research data active learning/machine learning.

Additionally, sustainability is a major consideration for us at Stanford Health Care. We are committed to being leaders in improving our IT carbon footprint, and decisions we make related to our infrastructure investments and partners are key considerations moving forward, both in the cloud and on-prem.

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/cloud-projects-are-powering-forward-health-system-cios-on-cloud-spending-amid-economic-pressures.html

Christian Lindmark. CTO of Stanford Health Care (Palo Alto, Calif.): The chief technology officer and their team play a key role in helping healthcare organizations achieve their overall strategic goals. Typically reporting to the CIO (as it is at Stanford Health Care), the primary role of a CTO is to ensure reliability, resiliency and security of all information systems, data and devices across the organization. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of applications in use across a health system, and the CTO is responsible for creating an infrastructure stack — both on-premise and in the cloud — that is quick to deploy, secure, fast to access and cost-effective for all these applications. The CTO needs to build strong and collaborative teams in infrastructure, engineering, networking, data center, identity/access management and end-user devices to accomplish this.

Secondly, CTOs are innovators, creating and implementing transformative technology offerings to improve the experience of our clinicians, staff and patients. Clinicians continue to rely more and more on technology in their clinical workflows, yet these technologies can often be cumbersome and frustrating if they’re not easy to use and not always available. The CTO needs to innovate, simplify and secure the technology environment and user experience while working hard to ensure these systems never go offline.

Lastly, but just as important as the other two, CTOs need to develop relationships with clinical leaders, hospital administration and other stakeholders throughout the organization. Having firsthand knowledge of the goals, challenges and vision of these individuals and departments is critical. The CTO role has typically been less clinically focused; however, partnerships with key clinical leaders across the organization are vital, especially as the CTO role in many organizations, such as Stanford Health Care, has expanded to include clinically facing systems such as biomedical engineering and clinical communication technologies.

The CTO role is different from the CIO or chief digital information officer role in that a significant focus for the CTO is on managing and driving technology in support of clinical operations, as opposed to technology that is directly clinical-facing or clinical by nature. The CIO role is the leader of the healthcare IT organization, responsible for ensuring all the IT teams are working closely together and aligned around the organization’s strategic goals. They are not only responsible for the scope under the CTO, but also the clinical/business applications, analytics and security teams, and ensuring the relationships between these teams and key clinical and hospital stakeholders is collaborative and driving toward the organizational strategic goals.

The CIO role has a seat at the executive leadership table within the healthcare organization and directly provides input and feedback into the organization’s strategic goals, while the CTO usually does not. The CIO provides the framework for success and removes obstacles to allow IT teams to succeed. There is no question that CIO and CTO have a mutually dependent relationship, as do the CIO and other IT leaders, but a great CIO makes all teams within IT successful, as well as ensures the organization sees IT not just as a cost center but as a partner in its success.