| | December 20198UTLOOK Healthcare Tech Think of all the records that a significant health care system generates. Orlando Health has more than 23,000 team members and will handle more than 800,000 patient visits, including nearly 100,000 admissions over a year. We have eight wholly owned or affiliated hospitals, with 2,400 beds serving Central Florida and beyond. Think of all of the physicians' notes, the laboratory tests, the X-rays and CT scans, the prescriptions were written, the hospital charts, the insurance records, and the bills. It's a veritable mountain of information, and curating, sharing and using it for clinical and administrative decision-making is daunting. Oh, and did I mention that much of this information is highly confidential and subject to government regulations? Now, think of how to manage a total overhaul of that system.This is what our $3.4 billion not-for-profit healthcare organization is going through right now.To any of my fellow CIOs contemplating anything similar, I have some advice. First and foremost, your entire leadership team must realize that this is not about technology; this is about change ­ change for the whole of the organization. Electronic records in the health care industry have been around for decades now. But different solutions were developed for different areas of care. There are systems for surgery, for the pharmacy, for the laboratory, for imaging, and so forth. At Orlando Health, we bought the "best of everything," not unlike other healthcare systems. Initially, developers expected the industry as a whole to reach a point where these different systems would be able to talk to each other. But those dreams were never realized.As a result, there has been a growing need in the health care industry to develop comprehensive record systems that can integrate everything from appointment scheduling to managing prescriptions, to storing images and medical histories. But deciding to create an entirely new system is not something to take lightly. For example, the money, time, and other resources that have been spent on existing Significant Technological Change Often Means a Cultural Shift for the Organization, Critical Learnings from Orlando HealthNovlet MattisIN MY OPINIONBy Novlet Mattis, CIO, Orlando Health
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