This Week Health
January 14, 2025

Myra Davis on Innovation Triage and Leveraging the “Pot of Gold” to Get Smarter, Faster

As health system leaders dive into a new calendar year – and a new list of priorities – one item that should be at the forefront is data, according to Myra Davis, EVP and Chief Information and Innovation Officer at Texas Children’s.

“Data is becoming the new asset,” she said, particularly for organizations the size and scope of Texas Children’s which have amassed terabytes of information. “We have a big opportunity and somewhat an obligation to leverage this pot of gold that we have and make something meaningful of it.” And with droves of digital natives entering the workforce, it is becoming increasingly important to provide a seamless experience.

During a recent Keynote, Davis shared insights on how her team is leveraging AI and advanced analytics to enhance user experience and improve outcomes, the approach she is leveraging to triage innovation, and her unique role as Chief Information and Innovation Officer.

Harnessing data

Myra Davis

For Davis’ team, the driving force behind every initiative is to “get smarter, faster” by harnessing data more effectively. “We’ve continued to move the dial in areas like leveraging data, performing advanced analytics, and bringing in our own internal instance of large language models so we can do more there and really be disruptive,” she noted. The objective? To gain meaningful insights, in partnership with the organization, to the “insurmountable amount of data we have” and use it to “help our organization get smarter faster.”

To that end, a key area of focus is the enterprise data warehouse, which holds data from 70 distinct source systems, making the search process quite onerous.“Imagine being able to sift through key data in those databases to bring to light patterns of learning that the models have identified and share that information with leaders across the system,” she said.

Good governance

Doing so requires a solid focus on AI governance. At Texas Children’s, a group was established that’s co-led by data and analytics executives, and incorporates input from compliance, finance, and clinical in addition to IT. Having that presence, according to Davis, helps guard against both hallucinations and unintentional bias as they look to provide actionable insights.

“There will be no limits in terms of where we can go and how we can help pockets of the organization get smarter faster, or how we can create efficiencies for a clinician who’s performing wash-rinse-repeat processes and make that better.” 

Hub and spoke model

That’s also where innovation comes into play – but only if it’s approached thoughtfully. In fact, when it was added to her title in 2019, Davis embarked on a listening tour to gauge the organization’s understanding as to what successful innovation entails.

What she learned is that it needed to be a true group effort. “We have a lot of smart people in this organization, and so we want to make sure it’s a unique idea that we should explore,” she noted. To that end, they developed a hub and spoke model whereby ideas are presented to the innovation team and put through some rigor, starting with: “Is it really a problem? And has that problem already been solved? We want to make sure it’s an idea we should actually explore.”

Discovery, design & development

If it meets that criteria, an idea then progresses to the discovery, design, and development methodology. 

  • Discovery: During the discovery phase, the organization seeks to determine how a particular problem can be solved, which may involve an existing technology or initiative. “We start by asking, can we leverage something we already have,” Davis said, noting that having both Information and Innovation gives her an edge in this realm. “I’m able to say, can we leverage our existing portfolio of technologies? Is it on a road map of any vendors that we partner with today? And if so, when will it be delivered and can it solve the problem that we’re looking at now? If the answer is yes, we make a plan to solve for that.”
  • Design. If the answer is no, the next step is design. “Everything involves people, process and technology,” she said. “We don’t allow problem statements to start with the solution. There’s an iterative process that is intended to articulate exactly what it is that you’re trying to solve.” Also critical? Determining whether there’s a dependency on a process or people competency. “Once we vet that out, we pause and say, ‘okay, we can’t solve for this.’” Additionally, if technology is implemented, but the processes and people pieces haven’t been addressed, it can lead to tech debt. “We have technology that’s not used because we don't have the right people associated with it, or we haven't truly looked at the process.”
  • Development. The last option is development, which Texas Children’s has done with remote patient monitoring virtual nursing initiatives. With the latter, “we were able to deliver and allow operational leaders to determine how they want to scale it going forward,” meaning the innovation team is able to release it and focus on the next opportunity.

That collaboration, Davis added, is critical. “It’s really important to make sure the IS team sees themselves as a part of the innovation. You do not want an ‘us against them’ mentality, or ‘they get to do all the cool things and we get to take care of everything,’” she said. “The innovation team works hand in hand with the rest of the IS team.”

Innovation triage

The challenge is that there’s no shortage of “cool things” that teams want to push forward. This is where governance can play a significant role. “Having strategic imperatives affords us an opportunity to hone in on the right projects in partnership with leaders across the system, as well as the physician community,” she noted. “Articulating your problem statement, identifying whether we can leverage technology we already have, and documenting the output measures allows us a scorecard to say, is this the right initiative we should focus on? Clearly, we want to focus on initiatives that drive great performance, enhance the experience, and also improve the bottom line.”

And despite the fact that Davis has ‘two I’s’ in her title, the onus doesn’t fall solely on her or her teams. “At the end of the day, innovation is everybody’s responsibility.”

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