Digital transformation requires staff buy-in for a seamless flow of information

From left: Dr. John Chessare, president and CEO of the GBMC; Bryan Bliven, CIO, University of Missouri Health Care; and moderator Janis Curtis, associate director of the Clinical Data Research Network at Duke, discuss digital transformation at HIMSS22.

Photo: Susan Morse\HFN

To get staff on board with digital transformation, everyone who will be using the system must be included in decision-making, according to Dr. John Chessare, president and CEO of the Greater Baltimore Medical Center Healthcare System.

How it usually works, he said during HIMSS22, is that "you get a group of people to decide something and then send an email out to everyone."

This doesn't work, agreed moderator Janis Curtis, associate director of the Clinical Data Research Network at Duke. She has first-hand experience. Nurses would not use a new workflow system because they were not consulted beforehand, she said.

The adage that people hate change is not true, Chessare said. What is true, he said, is that "people hate to be changed."

With so much digital innovation taking place, health systems are recognizing that one of the factors for adopting a seamless, organization-wide digital strategy is staff buy-in.

"Times have really changed, we have great collaboration in our system," Chessare said. "Culturally we're so much in a better place."

Chessare and Bryan Bliven, CIO of University of Missouri Health Care, spoke Thursday during the CxO spotlight session, "Driving Healthcare Transformation to Tackle Current and Future Challenges." 

A SEAMLESS TECHNICAL RECORD

Greater Baltimore Medical Center uses the one-patient, one-record approach, through Epic. Systems of care utilization management improved patient flow and created safer medication delivery systems, Chessare said.

"In order to prevent chronic disease, you have to have a medical record to see everything that's going on with an individual patient," Chessare said.

GBMC uses the Maryland health information exchange called CRISP to look at statewide COVID-19 data.

The University of Missouri uses concentric circles when it comes to sharing the technical record, Bliven said. Since UM doesn't own all of the hospitals with which it partners, the outer circle of information is shared with a trusted health information exchange.

"We try to be cognizant if it's in one record, we want to work on quality together," Bliven said. 

The pandemic accelerated the use of a service analytics center used at MU due to the COVID-19 metrics stored there. "That thing was getting hit multiple times a day," Bliven said. 

Once staff got used to getting reports from the center, they began looking for other data. "I think we got a little bit lucky in that aspect," Bliven said. "It took off."

The data is integrated into the regular workforce for a seamless exchange flow for clinical decision support. 

UM has also made improvements to trust the data, Bliven said. 

"That's been something, to trust the different data sources," Bliven said. "It does make it infinitely more usable."

Bliven added, "Healthcare data can be very messy."

Twitter: @SusanJMorse
Email the writer: SMorse@himss.org