Myra Davis, SVP & CIO, Texas Children’s Hospital, Chapter 2

If you ask Myra Davis, there’s a big component many leaders are missing when it comes to leveraging data: education. An organization can have all the coolest tools and technologies, but if clinicians don’t understand what exactly is available and how they can interpret it, the data just isn’t worth much. In this interview, the CIO of Texas Children’s Hospital talks about how her team has dealt with clinician expectations when it comes to data, and how they’re utilizing education and dashboards to help them get the most out of it. She also talks about the work her organization has done to implement an EDW and their plans going forward, how breaking down silos between IS and clinical has helped empower users, her strategy when it comes to fostering innovation, and why still thinks the industry is “a lot of fun.”

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* Dashboard education

* “The ability to understand technology is where we’re falling short.”

* Focus on evidence-based guidelines

* IS participation in care groups — “They realize they speak very different languages.”

* Adopting a clinical liaison model

* Plan, do, study, act — “If it’s not working, we’ll figure out how to make it better.”



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Bold Statements

It’s not that we have a shortage of the technology — we have that. The organization’s ability to understand the technology is where we’re falling short. So we’re really working closely with them on their structure and to educate them on what’s available.

We’ve been slow behind the eight ball on that one, but that’s something we’re focused on as a part of this effort. Because again, we have the data, but to pull the science and the methodology together associated with analyzing the data is an area of opportunity for us.

What I hear from the clinicians is that it’s been very valuable to have our IS team members participate as a part of their collaborative team, because they realize that they talk very different languages. And we do.

We’re really pushing the concept of self-service, education on tools, and working with our quality group to establish clinical liaisons who can be resources available to assist providers in understanding how to utilize the tool and interpret the data.

We are always looking to identify what’s not working, how can we make this better, let’s go through another cycle, let’s do a validation. That’s very positive about this organization — if it’s not working, we’ll figure out how to make it better.

Gamble:  When you talked about dashboards, I guess that’s kind of one way of taking it by chunks and maybe solving one issue at a time. Is that one way you’re doing it?

Davis:  Yes. What we have are dashboards for clinical care and operations. So for operational leaders, we have dashboards that speak to work hours per unit of service for hourly staff so that our leaders are able to really analyze operationally how they’re doing from a staffing standpoint. We have financial dashboards where every leader in the organization is able to see how they’re doing financially. So there are no excuses for running significant variances in your shop, because that data is available to you. These dashboards are all self-service too. We have a place — a SharePoint site — where you can go, if granted access, to these particular dashboards, depending on your role, and get that information.

When you look at it operationally, with the type of data that the organization is using, there’s a level of maturity there because they understand it. When you flip over to the clinical side, because there’s just so much and so many ways to do it,