Keith Perry, SVP & CIO, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Chapter 2

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

Chapter 2



* Patient advisory council

* A collaborative research environment

* Building the IT talent pipeline — “We need to do better.”

* Jude’s cloud journey

* The big pay-off

* Interacting with patients — “That has really grounded me.”

* Hitting reset after 13 years



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Bold Statements

Our goal is to not hold on to knowledge — our goal is to be stewards of the American people’s money. Our goal is to look at how can we create an environment for researchers and collaborators that are not part of St. Jude to run analysis and do discovery on the data that we’re producing.

We’ve got programs in place looking at how do we train the future, how do we engage with building a pipeline of talent for those coming out of college and getting them interested in healthcare IT. It’s a soapbox for me, and something I think the industry does a pretty poor job with.

That’s a business model that’s going to sustain itself, as opposed to having a collaborator say, ‘I need a copy of that data and then I need a local high performance computer environment in order to process that data.’ We see there’s a shift to those repeatable processes where you can use a cloud-based infrastructure.

It was a hard decision to leave and go to an environment where you’re basically starting over. You’re hitting reset on all the go-to people you knew that could get things done, and you’re having to build and develop relationships. That takes time.

Gamble:  As far as using mobile technology, I’m sure that that’s become really a lot more common especially since most of your patients as you said do not stay overnight; so really keeping that communication with them, I imagine, has been a priority.

Perry:  It is. We have ways to do that today because they’re at our housing facilities when they’re staying overnight. We’re a campus-based organization with a secure perimeter — you’re only getting on the campus if you have a business need to be here, or you’re a patient or a family member.

And so we’ve taken the first step in releasing a mobile application to our employee population to let them know what’s happening on campus — anything from food trucks to what’s in the cafeteria, to what events, seminars or conferences are happening, and other ways to engage our employees in what’s happening. We started with employees because we saw the need there, but we’re actually moving that to our patients and their family members as well because there’s a lot more going on in terms of either engaging them in their care but also letting them know what’s happening in the facility that they’re staying in.

We have special events in our Target house that are directed to those families; and so, we wanted a way to reach out and provide that information through mobile technology as opposed to just printing up flyers and posting them on doors.