I can’t believe I’m already writing my third monthly message to IS!
First off, I want to congratulate the Epic team and all their IS partners on carrying off what was a very successful upgrade over the weekend! I had the pleasure of dropping by the Renton command center and taking it all in — an impressive operation.
It’s been a busy couple months of onboarding, meeting so many stakeholders from across PSJH. I’ve met with key sponsors, our board of directors, the leadership of our local ministries, and many of you.
Learning the complexities of PSJH, let alone the healthcare space, is a lifetime learning curve. I’m finally beginning to learn enough, however, to shape a perspective on how we might structure ourselves and move forward as an IS organization. I now have a sketch of a structure to best support PSJH, sustain our Mission in an environment where the business and technology of healthcare is evolving quickly, and deliver a stable, high-reliability experience for our caregivers and patients.
Today, IS is what you’d call a traditionally “horizontally-structured” IT organization. We have established centers of excellence and strength in all the traditional healthcare IT spaces — EHR, traditional infrastructure, informatics, etc. However, now, in order to support the agility of the business changes we are seeing to the healthcare model, we’re needing to “think vertically,” aligning to support strategic areas of the PSJH business. This will mean exciting new IS teams we’re thinking about how to build that will support Ambulatory/Physician Enterprise, genomics, population health, and other critical and emerging areas in a more dedicated way with deeper expertise.
We’ll be sharing some of that initial structural thinking in the coming months as I work on it with our IS leadership and business partners.
A theme that has come up in all my visits across regions with our partners, and even with IS caregivers, is that — while emerging tech like AI, machine learning, big data, and block chain are super-exciting — we can’t forget on executing on the fundamentals. I know that our CTO and TEO SVP David Endicott is a big champion of that message: System and network reliability are table stakes and must be Job One. For all our investments and enormous efforts in upgrading our network through WAN Transformation and building our aligned instance of PSJH Epic, our IS credibility gets clobbered when we lose sight of the fundamentals of the caregiver technology experience. Things like ease of system access and network access when onboarding new caregivers, making sure we provide a pleasant Service Desk experience… These are the fundamentals that we can’t overlook.
I was so excited to have 600 of you join (some tried, but were shut out) of our fourth IS Open Forum since I came aboard. We didn’t even have that many on my first week call, so that was great turn-out! I love talking technology with this group, answering questions in real time, and engaging unfiltered. We’re going to look at upgrading the capacity of our next Open Forum on the afternoon of Thursday, April 18, so look for that new information.
I always look forward to continuing the conversation with this team, and thank you for your emails and conversations on my travels. Keep it coming!
-B.J.