Throughout her 5 years at CIO of Johnson Metropolis, Tennessee-based Ballad Well being, Pam Austin has helped architect a system-wide digital transformation centered on streamlining expertise, bettering clinician workflows and increasing entry to care throughout the group’s largely rural footprint.
One of the crucial impactful initiatives Austin has led is the standardization of Ballad’s expertise infrastructure throughout its 20 hospitals — half of which serve rural communities — by consolidating programs and transitioning to a single, unified Epic platform.
The main focus of this effort has been on lowering redundant functions and boosting usability for clinicians, she mentioned. Austin identified that usability is a vital a part of digital transformation.
“We work intently with our frontline crew members in scientific areas to know their workflows and what their ache factors are. We speak to them about their use of the EMR and what a greater expertise ought to appear to be, as a result of usability is crucial — if a software provides extra clicks or complexity, it’s not going to final,” she acknowledged.
She thinks most instruments ought to merely “fade into the background” — that means they work behind the scenes to allow extra face time between sufferers and suppliers. The final word aim is to make sure that expertise helps, fairly than complicates, care supply, particularly within the rural communities Ballad serves.
In rural areas, the largest barrier isn’t expertise —it’s change administration, Austin famous.
“In rural communities, you’ll see sufferers typically have longstanding, trusted relationships with their suppliers straight. After which we introduce digital care fashions like telehealth — in order that needs to be completed with care, not disruption. We now have to take a affected person=first strategy. We deal with intuitive instruments and supplier steerage. We now have the supplier work straight with their affected person to allow them to construct that belief with a well-known clinician. That supplier walks the affected person by the brand new course of and methods to undertake that expertise, then the adoption occurs quicker,” she defined.
She additionally famous that every one IT initiatives at Ballad begin by addressing a transparent scientific and/or operational want — the well being system doesn’t simply implement tech for tech’s sake.
In Austin’s view, CIOs need to be extra strategic than ever.
“We have to be ahead considering — what expertise is coming down the pipe and getting ready our group accordingly. After which we embed analysts and managers and administrators in every of the operational areas — so we perceive what’s occurring in income cycle, within the pharmacy, within the lab, in radiology, in nursing, and with our suppliers, each on the ambulatory and acute aspect. We now have to actually perceive how the expertise is impacting the operations of the complete group,” she remarked.
Her work underscores how healthcare CIOs are not simply IT leaders — however now key drivers of tradition, care high quality and organizational cohesion.
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