Getting a Deep Understanding of User Workflows Key to Driving Change, Says Eric Jimenez, CIO, Artesia General Hospital

In this interview, Eric Jimenez, CIO of Artesia General Hospital, a 25-bed hospital with 16 clinics in southeastern New Mexico, discusses the hospital’s initiatives and challenges as a rural healthcare provider. Jimenez talks about going from many EMRs to standardizing on TruBridge; a recently completed on-premise data center; and how they are integrating AI to improve operations, reduce physician burnout, and enhance efficiency with Microsoft Dax Copilot.

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Anthony: Welcome to healthsystemsCIO’s Interview with Eric Jimenez, CIO at Artesia General Hospital. I’m Anthony Guerra, Founder and Editor-in-Chief. Eric, thanks for joining me.

Eric: Thank you for having me.

Anthony: Very good, Eric. You want to start off by telling me a little bit about your organization and your role.

Eric: Artesia General Hospital is a 25-bed rural acute care hospital with 16 clinics located in southeastern New Mexico. We have a main campus and clinics in Artesia, New Mexico and we also have remote clinics in a town about 30 miles south of us in Carlsbad. We provide a large range of services from family practice, behavioral health, endocrinology, cardio, ortho, pain management, podiatry, urology, room care hyperbaric services and of course, we have the traditional inpatient, ER, radiology, lab, all those different services that a regular health system would have.

Anthony: Very good. You’re a rural small health system. You’re facing some of the challenges that that group of healthcare providers is facing and we’ll get into that. Why don’t you start off by telling me about some of the main projects or things that you’ve been working on in the last year or so and then we’ll go from there.

Eric: We just completed build-out of our new data center at the beginning of the year. We were in a full hyper converge environment and we are running out of space and size in storage, in cooling. We’re facing constant issues with our data center and our executive team decided we had to make big decisions, one of them was if we’re going to move to the cloud or stay on premise. The executive teams believe that staying on prem is still the best road map for us. Being in a rural area, we do have limited internet connections sometimes and that can hinder patient care. We decided to double down and build a new data center that allows us to be prepared for the future.

Another major project is our CEO tasked the executive team to focus on how artificial intelligence is going to help us in the future and to figure out how to best make that work for our organization. We always have to look at it from a different manner as far as the triple aim mentality, and that’s where I want to focus. We look at that triple aim of care and try to figure out how to mix that into our IT strategy.

Anthony: They assume you’re the AI guy and you’re going to know it like Elon Musk, right. In your situation, in every healthcare system, you’re trying to do the best you can with what you have. Everybody says it’s tight in healthcare all over the place in terms of margins and costs. You have to watch your expenses. In IT, you’re expected to bring in solutions that are going to save money even though they cost money to bring them in.

AI is one of those things that people hope, or assume, or think, might be what saves them. How do you go about figuring out where AI might help the health system? This is a classic dynamic in IT leadership – how much do you lead and bring ideas to users and how much do you let ideas and...