John Showalter, MD, CHIO, University of Mississippi Medical Center, Chapter 2

There’s a lot of excitement around predictive analytics, and for good reason. Organizations like University of Mississippi MC are seeing positive results in areas like reducing pressure ulcers. But, as with any advance in technology, there are hurdles that must be overcome, most notably resistance from clinicians about how workflow will be affected. In this interview, John Showalter, MD, talks about his team’s approach to change management and how they’re working to quell clinician fears. He also discusses the pros and cons of going big-bang, what he believes will be the next wave of predictive analytics, what it was like to go from the “well-defined” CMIO role to the more nebulous CHIO role, and his advice on how to communicate more effectively with physician leaders.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* The next wave of predictive analytics: hospital-acquired conditions

* Shifting “to a more of a preventive mentality”

* Managing “cultural resistance”

* From CMIO to CHIO

* “We hit the ground on a sprint.”

* Data visualization with Qlik

* Creating Propel Health IT to “disseminate knowledge”

* Best practices for working with physician leaders



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Bold Statements

I think there’s going to be a big challenge to sell people on the technology. I think it’s going to seem a little bit magic that you could put 200,000 people through an algorithm and come up with 100 people that need your attention the most.

It was going from a very defined role to a very open and ill-defined opportunity to say, we know we should get benefit by doing analytics on the data we’re producing, but we don’t know what that looks like.

It was a very exciting place to be in to cobble together best practices from other organizations into a unified strategy.

There was a whole lot of knowledge we had received in our training that was not really getting disseminated, and was not part of the standard graduate curriculum. Even people coming out with a Master’s degree weren’t getting insights into the differences of psychology between different groups of clinicians and administrators in healthcare, and the information around the fusion of innovation.

You can’t treat the nurses the same way you treat the docs and the administrators. You need to tailor your message to really how they process it, and structure your meetings and your adoption around how the different groups function. If you just try to aim for the middle, you’re going to miss everybody.

Gamble:  As far as predictive analytics, what do you think the next wave is going to be for your organization?

Showalter:  There’s definitely a wave of predictive analytics around hospital-acquired conditions, things that are part of value-based purchasing, and things that are going to be tracked in MACRA, but I think the next wave is going to be at a population level. It’s going to be looking at the ambulatory population and predicting who’s likely to get sick in the next 12 to 24 months, who’s likely to become a very expensive patient in an ACO, and then trying to intervene before they become expensive. So I think we’re going to shift from this inpatient, acute mentality to a more of a preventive mentality around predictive analytics.

Gamble:  And when that wave comes, do you think it is going to be a matter of selling people on the technology the same way you’ve had to do that with analytics?

Showalter:  Yes. I think there’s going to be a big challenge to sell people on the technology. I think it’s going to seem a little bit magic that you could put 200,000 people through an algorithm and come up with 100 pe...