Keith Perry, SVP & CIO, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Chapter 1

There are two areas that have become a passion for Keith Perry. The first is finding a better way for researchers to collaborate (which, in turn, can lead to improved outcomes), and the second is growing the pool of health IT talent that can take the industry to the next level. At St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, where he has held the CIO since the summer of 2015, Perry is working with his team to achieve those and other goals. In this interview, he talks about how the organization is leveraging data to improve the patient experience, the challenge in redefining workflows to make sure they reflect clinicians’ evolving needs, and what it was like to start a new role after 13 years at MD Anderson.

Chapter 1



* St. Jude’s unique model: “No family bears the burden of cost for treatment.”

* Longstanding partnership with Cerner

* Process improvement to redefine workflows

* “We’re challenging the way we’ve been doing things.”

* Turning data into information — “Research is inherent in what we do each day.”

* Leveraging analytics to improve patient experience



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Bold Statements

It gives you a sense of accomplishment that, from a technologist perspective, however minuscule and small our part is, we are still providing a needed service to help our clinicians and faculty members to deliver outstanding care, and at the same time are performing the research that’s really driving us toward that next cure.

Technology has advanced, and our knowledge of how we treat diseases has advanced since we’ve implemented Cerner. And so it’s recognizing that, and partnering with our clinical operations to put in place things to step back and challenge the way that we’ve constantly been doing things.

There’s a demand for not only storing that information, which does absolutely nothing but keep it around, but also processing it and making sense of it. That’s where we’re seeing a really big push and leveraging cloud technology and leveraging an existing high performance computing environment.

There’s a lot of waste in our system in terms of patients and family members waiting from appointment to appointment — can we challenge ourselves to do a better job, either with how we schedule on the front end or how we transition them between appointments? And so we’re bringing in technology in to help with that.

We should be doing a better job of how things connect together. That’s really exciting for us because we’re taking that as an opportunity to determine how do we bring systems, processes, and data together and present that to the patients and their loved ones to make their experience just a little bit easier.

Gamble:  Hi Keith, thanks so much for taking time to speak with us.

Perry:  Not a problem.

Gamble:  Can you talk a little bit about St. Jude’s Research Hospital — what you have in terms of hospital beds and the affiliate clinics, and just give some general information about the organization?

Perry:  I’d be more than happy to. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital started in the early sixties as a vision from Danny Thomas, the entertainer, around the notion that no child should die in the dawn of their life. Our mission really stems around that. Our sole focus is on catastrophic childhood diseases; about 80 percent is focused on oncology, although we have pretty large programs around sickle cell and other blood disorders.

From a hospital bed perspective, we’re relatively small. We have less than 100 beds — about 75 — and so the majority of our care is outpatient treatment. What makes us unique is no child, no family bears the burden of cost for getting treatment at St. Jude. We take that very seriously, and we’re funded by the American people.