Technology for Seamless Connectivitiy with Patients

Kim Jackson, Director - Data Warehousing, St Joseph Health System

Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 and expectations

The biggest challenge for health care is the ability to keep up with the ever increasing demands of expanding data needs. Health care has extensive regulatory needs to keep all information and audit trails. This not only causes data storage issues but conversation and ETL issues. How can hospitals upgrade, expand and maintain the volumes of information and gain insights all at the same time? This is a huge struggle for many organizations.

The areas in business environment where solutions do not yet exist or not up to the mark, and which if existed, would've made job easier

I work in data management domain; something that keeps me up is the ever increasing regulatory measure criteria. We have to publish almost the same information in dozens of different formats with just enough variation to make each project separate. This causes mountains of rework, taking resources away and making progress on new innovative projects. Many of these rules make the submission of electronic versions risky since they have resulted due to the shear vastness of the EMR.

Manner in which Data is used to head off problems and complications before they happen

My organization has made headway in many areas. We have created standards in identification of inpatients that are at risk of readmission, patients that have high acuity scores and patients that are on too many antibiotics to name a few. We have deployed many methods, ambient, pushed alerts and reports and deep dives in prioritized patient lists in the EMR.

Thoughts on how IT strategic planning supports organization-wide efforts to improve quality, cut costs and improve efficiency in the Healthcare sector

IT strategic plans support our organization-wide efforts to improve clinical quality, reduce costs and improve efficiency by ensuring that technology is an enabler. For a healthcare organization to be successful, information needs to be part of business as usual. IT must be effortless and not get in the way of care.

Technology Trends Impacting Enterprise Business Environment

An exciting trend is the new file based data platform, such as Hadoop. This has the potential for us to gain process all over. I am also looking forward to cloud computing or a shared co-location. These advances will allow application owners like myself to worry less about data storage and concentrate on our data content.

My roles and responsibilities as a CIO

A CIO need not only be an advisor to their business counter parts, but also can play a key strategic role to ensure that vetted cutting edge technology gets into the hands of our care givers. The key take away is that good technology is seamless and helps better communication with our patients instead of getting in the way their experience.

Lessons learnt and your advice for fellow CIOs

IT needs to be an enabler, the subject manner expert that can recommend new advancements. We need to keep the organization informed to health, security and stability of the IT environment. Investing in the visual story of these operational areas will lead to trust and transparency throughout the organization. Most importantly we need to co-lead these efforts with our business counterparts.

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