Clinical Continuity Planning Getting More Attention, But Work Remains, Says Seattle Children’s SVP, Chief Digital and Information Officer, Dr. Zafar Chaudry

In this healthsystemCIO interview, Anthony Guerra, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, sits down with Dr. Zafar Chaudry, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital and Information Officer at Seattle Children’s. In this discussion, Dr. Chaudry covers the topic of his CHIME Fall Forum presentation – “Stay Calm and Operate On: Cybersecurity Meets Patient Care Continuity.” Dr. Chaudry sheds light on the evolving landscape of cybersecurity in healthcare and the critical intersection of technology and patient care continuity; highlighting the need for collaboration between IT and clinical teams to prepare for potential cyber incidents.

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Anthony: Welcome to healthsystemCIOs interview with Dr. Zafar Chaudry, SVP, Chief Digital and Information Officer with Seattle Children’s. I’m Anthony Guerra, Founder and Editor-in-Chief. Dr. Chaudry, thanks for joining me.

Dr. Chaudry: Thanks for having me, Anthony.

Anthony: For the few who don’t know you, a little bit about your organization and your role.

Dr. Chaudry: Seattle Children’s Pediatric Health System is in the Pacific Northwest. We’re spread out across Washington, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. And yes, we take care of kiddos here in the Pacific Northwest. My role, leading the IT team all the way from infrastructure through to digital health and analytics, all sit under information technology at Seattle Children’s.

Anthony: You’re speaking in a session at the CHIME fall forum – Stay Calm and Operate On: Cybersecurity Meets Patient Care Continuity, a huge issue. I feel like it’s evolved over the last few years to where people are starting to do more to work with the clinical side of the house in preparation for a cyber outage.

Can you tell me about that topic? Obviously, this is going to be somewhat what your session is about, but please go from there. Thank you.

Dr. Chaudry: I agree that certainly over the last six months there has been an uptick in cyber events and awareness around cyber events. I do think that the clinical teams are more aware because IT has been testing their own teams through fake phishing attacks, hearing about what’s happening at other hospitals that have been affected. But I think there is a fine balance between clinical teams, whose job is to take care of patients. And there’s a massive amount of burnout on the clinical side. And so how do you balance training people in business continuity versus them doing their day job? I think IT has a huge component in this, which is the disaster recovery piece, right?

We have to get systems back to whatever we’ve agreed with our health system on around uptime, recovery point, recovery time. But from a business continuity perspective, which is the most important thing, I still think we have a massive amount of work to do. I don’t think people get the right level of training. We don’t do enough tabletop exercises, although we have now started to do those. We are not taking time to communicate to teams what this means and how this will actually all come together. And yes, absolutely, we work closely with our emergency management team and our clinical incident management team. We decided that if we had any form of incident, and we tested this with the CrowdStrike piece, we let the clinical incident management team run the incident, and we were supporting that incident. Because fundamentally, the decisions that are made have to be made with a clinical eye, not with an IT eye. And we are there to support getting the right systems on first,