Darren Dworkin, CIO, Cedars-Sinai, Chapter 2

“Innovation in hospitals isn’t new.” It may seem like an obvious statement, but as most health IT leaders can attest, it’s not. In fact, it’s a common misconception. The reality, says Darren Dworkin, CIO at Cedars-Sinai, is that innovation has always been a core philosophy at academic medical centers. What’s novel is the focus around delivery of care, and the pivotal role digital technology can play facilitating communication and enabling patients to become more engaged.

At Cedars-Sinai, innovation has always been part of the culture, whether it’s by being an early adopter of Epic’s Care Everywhere, working with Apple as a foundation member, or creating a “living lab” for startups through its Accelerator program. For Dworkin, this philosophy is the only way to move forward in the ever-changing health IT landscape. Recently, we spoke with him about the evolution in consumer engagement (and what it means for CIOs), how the recent Cambridge Analytica saga “opened peoples’ eyes,” the most significant way in which the CIO role has changed since he started 12 years ago, and what gets him most excited about the future.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* Lessons learned from Cambridge Analytica – “It has opened peoples’ eyes.”

* The “unintended consequences” of opening up APIs

* Aggregating data – “It’s hard not to get excited about that.”

* Cedar-Sinai’s “legacy of innovation”

* Creating an agile foundation for core systems

* Accelerator boot camp – “We don’t have a monopoly on good ideas.”

* Removing the constraints for startups



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Bold Statements

We’re faced with this new chapter of ‘how do we support and enable all the wonderful things we can today through information sharing, but do so in a way that doesn’t have too many unintended consequences?’

When we had some early challenges with our first forays into information technology deployment, we pulled ourselves up and tried it again. Because of that, we’ve had a good amount of success in terms of laying down the agile foundation for our core systems.

It’s just been a very rewarding experience for us to help spawn these great companies, and hope that some of the infectious entrepreneurialism — that ‘go get them, we can’t fail’ perspective — rubs off on what sometimes can be a large bureaucratic organization.

One of the things we learned early on about startups is that they’re almost constrained by structure. That doesn’t mean that you can’t infuse the right amount of structure and process, but you want to be really careful about it.

I have to admit that as CIO, if I was putting my judgment hat on, I’d probably would have dismissed these folks long ago.

Gamble:  It’s interesting how far we’ve come in terms of understanding the implications of sharing data.

Dworkin:  I think so. The Cambridge Analytica-Facebook incident is now behind us, but I believe it’s opened peoples’ eyes to the fact that not everybody has the best of intentions. Now we have to find a balance. The well-intended rules and regulations around data blocking or preventing data blocking and opening up the API — all of those make sense. We were big supporters of them. We’re happy they’re in existence, because they were necessary. But like everything in life, there’s always a series of unintended consequences. And so now, we’re faced with this new chapter of ‘how do we support and enable all the wonderful things we can today through information sharing, but do so in a way that doesn’t have too many unintended consequences?’ What we’ve learned is that for a lot of these things involving data,