| | October 201919UTLOOKHealthcare Tech I have the good fortune of being the CIO at the leading musculoskeletal hospital in the U.S., maybe even the world. Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), located in New York City, was named the No. 1 orthopedic hospital in the country for the seventh consecutive year by U.S. News and World Report (2016-17). Every day, I have the privilege of leading a team that provides technology solutions to clinicians and staff working to get their patients back to doing the things they need and love to do. Excellence is the standard here, and the status quo is never good enough.And, IT at HSS is a success--in 2016, we implemented electronic medical records (Epic) across our enterprise for both inpatient and ambulatory. As hospital leadership sees it, Epic is the `Operating System" of our hospital. We have improved patient satisfaction post go-live, and IT staff engagement, as measured by Gallup, is way up. Most importantly, we have established a single source of truth for our clinical and patient financial information, the data bedrock of the organization. The dilemma? How do we move on from this success to the next set of challenges--fully digitizing the patient experience in an organization that is rapidly growing and transforming itself?First, here is some context about the future of my organization. We are poised to digitize our care delivery platform, which will allow it to be scalable, to meet the needs of consumers and patients around the country and across the globe. As the IT department, we play a major role in supporting and enabling this transformation.If past success is a good predictor of future success, here is my `large scale project' best practice list based on our recent Epic electronic medical record implementation:1. People and Team: building the very best team, whether through external hires or repositioning internal high performers is key. Our IT Team for the project was a combination of existing IT staff, internal transfers from within hospital operations and external hires--a fantastic mix of talent and experience.2. Planning and Resourcing: spending appropriate time (a year in our case) to plan for the implementation, including developing a detailed cost model that included contingency funds, was critical. Enterprise-wide software implementations and the related operational transformation processes are expensive. The organization must have the necessary funds to support such an endeavor--so clearly identifying all costs at the onset is required.3. Organizational Buy-In and Imperative: maintaining the organizational focus and sustained energy needed for a project of this complexity would be challenging if everyone was not vested in the process and goals. Starting with the software selection activities, we included a cross-section of hospital staff including doctors, nurses, clinicians, and operational frontline staff. We made sure that there was a shared goal and an imperative to reach that goal. Our rallying cry became "One Patient, One Record, One HSS" signaling the organization's recognition of the advantages of a single source of IT truth in delivering the best patient care.Building on Success-- A CIO's DilemmaBy Jamie Nelson, CIO, Hospital for Special SurgeryCIO INSIGHTS
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