Inside CHIME: Spring Forum’s Four Speakers Cover the Gamut

Inside CHIME - header

 

3.14.18
Summer O’Neill, Director, Education 
Candace Stuart, Director, Communications & Public Relations

 

The patient as a consumer, the physician as a healthcare IT user and collaborator, the CIO as a future maker and the individual as catalyst for positive change. The four keynote speakers at the CHIME HIMSS CIO Forum in Las Vegas presented four different but complementary themes when they took to the stage March 5.

The day started with greetings from CHIME Board Chair Cletis Earle and CHIME President and CEO Russ Branzell, with Frank Sinatra classics in the background. Earle discussed membership growth: “CHIME has members on every continent except Antarctica, and we’re actively looking for a penguin CIO right now,” he said. He outlined some of the new features in the CHIME HealthCare’s Most Wired program and emphasized CHIME’s continued commitment to collaboration and diversity.

Liz Johnson, chair of the CHIME Foundation and the Public Policy Steering Committee, discussed some progress related to HITECH but cautioned much work remains to be done to ensure that any measures going forward under Meaningful Use are reasonable, add value and improve outcomes. She also discussed some of the CHIME Foundation’s achievements and upcoming events.

Nicholas Webb, author of What Customers Crave, called the patient experience the low-hanging fruit for hospitals and healthcare systems. “Most hospitals believe if they deliver patient care they did enough,” Webb said. “For the patient, it is the human experience.” Technology invariably plays a role in that experience and technology will facilitate collaborative networks that enhance the patient experience. He said to put in place an innovative team who handle disruptive innovation and an architecture to support the customer experience. CIOs like CHIME’s members, he said, will be the ones who drive change in healthcare.

Robert Wachter, M.D., author of The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age, recapped some of the harms that had occurred with the dawn of EHRs. “What could go wrong? Pretty much everything,” he said. But he also saw benefit with today’s EHRs, recounting how an informatics team used the University of California San Francisco Medical Center’s EHR to trace the source of C diff. infections that had been nagging the center: a specific CT scanner in the Emergency Department. “My hospital is now better and safer.”

Healthcare is undergoing a massive transformation but it will take longer than other industries to digitize, Wachter predicted. Some health systems still try to impose paper-based workflows on digital solutions but he sees efficiencies, too. He cited a remote glucose monitoring program that allowed a physician to review and treat hospitalized patients with diabetes in the early morning from his home. A face-to-face consult might take 45 minutes to an hour, the same amount of time it took the physician to remotely get through a full case load.

Seth Mattison, an expert on workforce trends, encouraged members to help leaders navigate an approaching work environment that is part traditionally hierarchical and part a hyperconnected network. He spent little time on the stage and instead walked through the ballroom to discuss with members work experiences and assumptions that might clash with a Web-based generation.

“Youth are the fringe dwellers. They live on the edge of society,” he said. “That’s their job, to push us forward. … Look to youth to understand where we are going next. What starts out serving youth will serve us all.”

He called members future makers who can find a balance between the hierarchical and networked worlds. He recommended forming a coalition and providing a clear vision and communication strategy for others to follow. “Cut the script, speak from the heart and keep the say-do ratio high.”

Liz Murray, the closing keynote and author of Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard, shared her experiences as a child of severely addicted parents in the Bronx who as a homeless teenager determined she could turn her life around. Through her persistence and the foresight of a teacher, she was accepted into an alternative school, finished four years of high school in two years with stellar grades, received a scholarship from the New York Times and was accepted into Harvard – all while homeless.

She did not use slides to augment her story but instead let the messages speak for themselves. She recounted experiences with people in authority who were dismissive and abusive to those who were vulnerable. She urged members as leaders in health systems to “never be that person to someone else. It impacts people.” She emphasized that her childhood was not unique and also offered many examples of kindness: her parents’ affection, a neighbor who watched over her sister and her for whom she named a foundation, the teacher who accepted her, a woman who did her laundry and the nonprofit that provided free food when she was homeless.

“You always make a difference,” she observed. “What difference do you make?”

The daylong forum was interspersed with other short presentations: Chair-elect Shafiq Rab unveiled TransformIT, a new resource that is exclusive to CHIME members; Randy McCleese, as the 2017 John E. Gall Jr. CIO of the Year, offered thanks for his award; Myra Davis, Marc Probst, Albert Oriol, Jan-Eric Slot and David Finn received recognition for completing their service on the CHIME Board; CHIME Education Foundation Board Chair Myra Davis suggested ways to support the foundation; and Ed Kopetky and Jim Turnbull provided an update on the Opioid Task Force that they co-chair.

See photos from the CHIME HIMSS CIO Forum

More Inside CHIME