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  Today in Health IT five questions top CIOs are prioritizing. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. VMware has been committed to our mission of providing relevant content to health IT professionals since the start.

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All right, to today's story, today's story comes from Becker's, and I like these. They send emails out to CIOs. They ask them to prioritize questions that they're trying to answer for their health systems and why that question's important. They grabbed five really good CIOs, and so I'm gonna share with you some of that.

Lisa Dykstra. Senior VP and CIO at Lori Children's Hospital in Chicago. The question that she is prioritizing right now is as the role of the CIO continues to expand and grow in complexity, how are you preparing your teams and organization for the future of healthcare? I. All right. Now I'm gonna come back to each of these questions and give you a little bit of detail on what they said.

Next was BJ Moore, he's prioritizing this question, how do we continue accelerating the adoption of advanced technologies such as machine learning, ai, big data, or internet of things for patient outcomes and caregiver productivity, and build upon modern hybrid workplace momentum in the way that supports organizational resilience, innovation, and strong culture.

Manu Tandon, CIO of Beth Israel, Leahy Health out of Boston has this question, is it time to expedite the adoption of the public cloud for healthcare providers? Interesting question. Ryan Smith, CIO for Intermountain Healthcare. How will we provide an equitable experience to all employees in a new hybrid work environment?

And that's one I'm finding a lot of people are trying to answer right now. Ellen Pollock, interim, CIO and Chief Nursing Informatics Officer at UCLA Health has the question of how can it best support a COVID-19 fatigue workforce? These are some great questions and I love that. I'm gonna come back to that.

And so what, why it is such a powerful thing. To be asking the right questions. Let's go back. Lisa again asked the questions of how are you preparing your team and organization for the future of healthcare? She goes on to say, we can't do anything without strong partnership across the organization and need to support the continued advancement of the skills and credentials of our talented technology and application teams who are also seeing greater evolution.

Of team roles and responsibilities. And I agree. The things in technology are moving so rapidly. New technologies are emerging all the time. New requirements are emerging all the time, and we need to figure out ways to keep them current. And I know if you are like me, you can only send so many people to certain conferences.

You really have to develop individualized plans for career development and skills development. All along the way, BJ Moore, how are we going to tap into these new technologies in order to address the challenges that are facing healthcare? And he says, the past year and a half has had an accelerating effect on the adoption of technology and the modernization of the workplace and the workforce.

Tools and practices we must build upon the momentum and . Accelerated progress in a way that takes into consideration our caregivers experience and wellbeing. Our need to nurture and grow a great culture of innovation and focus on practices that migrate unnecessary fatigue and burnout. I. That is why he's prioritizing that question, and I think it's an appropriate prioritization.

We have Manu Tandon ask the question about public cloud, and this is the response, surprisingly, with a well strategized determined plan. The answer to all of the above can be a resounding yes in a call for action if enough of the health systems join. . This direction and bring our dollars to this space.

Our combined leverage will accelerate healthcare innovation by public cloud vendors who are actually waiting for us to do so to support the future growth. A classic win-win. It's interesting. Public cloud has always stayed on the background of this conversation. But as we're gonna see later on this week, there's an interesting public cloud win in healthcare, a pretty significant public cloud win in healthcare.

And so it's an interesting question to be examining at this point. Ryan Smith hybrid work environment has this to say organizations have recently begun or soon will be entering the hybrid environment. Where a portion of many teams will once again be physically gathered in meeting spaces while others on the team will be joining remotely.

As equity, including experience equity, increases in importance, we need to ensure that we provide a seamless experience supporting all employees irrespective of location. And again, this is a top of mind issue for a lot of CIOs, and I think it is important equity. Has to be considered because there is a very different experience for people in the office versus people who are gonna be remote.

And we talked about this bias that exists in those types of environments where people who happen to be present, who happen to be on site, tend to get promotions, tend to get better projects and those kinds of things. Ellen Pollock interim. CIO at UCLA Health, how can it best support a covid fatigue workforce?

And she goes on to say this, it can best support this fatigue workforce by being present and round in the clinical areas. Often meaning with end users where they work can make an impactful connection between them and the technology team partnering with operations. When they are meeting to improve processes, asking probing questions and listening to the answers can benefit the entire system.

The primary focus must be on improving efficiencies by automating wherever possible and streamlining workflows. It's also important to ensure workflows are intuitive by eliminating steps wherever possible. These are great questions. What's the so what on this? This is a powerful planning exercise. What questions are you trying to solve?

If you're successful, will you answer the question or advance a solution? Set down the road. Questions are powerful. What questions are you trying to answer? I can still clearly remember the first strategy slide deck I presented to the St. Joseph Health Board in 2011, and here were some of the questions we were trying to answer.

Can we deliver care where people live outside the four walls of the health system? At the same quality, can we become more agile? I. As the health system, will the cloud enable us to be able to respond to changes we are experiencing in healthcare. And finally, there is a digital health explosion going on.

How are we going to plug into it? Those were the three questions that I posed to the board. They ended up being the foundation for a lot of our strategy. From 2011 to 2015, and we did make a major move to the cloud. As a result of that, we became much more nimble and agile. We invested in a lot of technologies that were about taking care into the community, into the home.

Monitoring people in their homes. We set up call centers and those kinds of things. The questions you are trying to answer will dictate your strategy. It is a powerful process. What questions are we trying to answer? I like the questions we asked. They are still relevant today as they were back in 2011.

What are the questions you are trying to answer for your health system? That's all for today. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com, or wherever you listen to podcast Apple, Google Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher.

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