Joe Bengfort, CIO, UCSF Medical Center and Campus, Chapter 2

Want to know the secret to being CIO at a large academic organization? Fear. “If I wasn’t a little bit worried about being able to deliver what the institution needs, it would mean I’m not paying attention,” says Joe Bengfort. But that, of course, is just part of an equation that also includes a confident knowledge of IT functions, a willingness to engage in the business side, and an ability to apply lean methodologies to situations like consolidating IT departments. In this interview, he talks about UCSF’s clinical enterprise strategy — and the infrastructure required to support it; his team’s “incremental approach” to analytics; the challenge academic organizations face in securing data without stifling creativity; and how he believes the CIO role will continue to evolve.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* UCSF’s analytics approach — “We’re incrementally moving and maturing the data model.”

* Early adopter of Epic Cogito

* Creating dashboards to ID and solve issues

* Two-tiered governance structure — “You can’t throw big, heavy governance at this.”

* Lean — “It’s a culture first.”

* Consolidating IT departments



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Bold Statements

I’m not really interested in a multiple million-dollar implementation of a standard data model and a standard set of tools that we’re all going to use, because in an environment where there is so much change and so much innovation, you could invest a tremendous amount of money and still be way behind.

We’re solving business problems early and often; instead of asking the business to wait for a year or two while we get all of this technical infrastructure in place, we’re taking more of a scrum method of building up analytic muscle and capability.

You cannot throw a big heavy governance at something like this if you’re just getting started. You really have to get focused on what are you trying to accomplish in those early days and put governance in place that’s very efficient and focused on those problems, and then grow it over time. Otherwise, it becomes almost a roadblock.

You can have a significant impact very, very quickly, and then if you don’t continue to follow up, you can lose those gains quite quickly as well, so we’ve learned that it takes a good degree of follow up and leadership engagement to ensure the incremental improvements that you’ve made don’t dissipate quickly.

That’s one thing that we found with lean — don’t look for 10 or 20 or 30 percent improvements. Look for 75 or 100 percent improvements, and you will find them.

Gamble:  You talked about looking toward optimization, and I would imagine that along those lines, you’re talking about getting into things like data mining and being able to enable the users to leverage the data to improve care?

Bengfort:  Yes, this is a critical aspect of our strategy. As I mentioned earlier, our approach to this has been a little bit different. The analytics marketplace, especially in healthcare, is fairly young. It’s a very complex data set that we’re dealing with, and so it becomes quite a challenge, but there’s a tremendous amount of innovation going on in the marketplace.

My approach to this has been that we want to work incrementally in this regard. I’m not really interested in a multiple million-dollar implementation of a standard data model and a standard set of tools that we’re all going to use, because in an environment where there is so much change and so much innovation going on, you could invest a tremendous amount of money and still be way behind where the marketplace is. So our approach to this has been a very of business problem-type focus,