Myra Davis, SVP & CIO, Texas Children’s Hospital, Chapter 3

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

Chapter 3



* SXSW Pediatric Health Pitch & TMC Think Tank

* “There are so many ideas coming at you.”

* Focus on portals

* Telehealth — “It will give us the ability to spread our wings further.”

* The “gotcha” with having a blank slate

* Health IT today — “Despite the amount of work, it’s still a lot of fun.”



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Bold Statements

It was an awesome experience to watch companies pitch their ideas and innovative thoughts on how to enhance care, introducing new concepts to integrate with certain things that already happen in the health care environment. It was really good, I really enjoyed it.

We’re looking at really increasing activation by having provider engagement and determining how best to use the data that we have in the data warehouse to target specific populations via the portal and push education material out, so that’s really exciting.

This is an area we’re still going to pursue simply because it’s a market differentiator and it will give us the ability to spread our wings a little further than brick and mortar. We’re moving cautiously, but we are having diligent actions around it.

It gives us a chance to put new solutions in there, but the gotcha has been retrofitting and ensuring that whatever we put in the new hospital is close to compatible with the existing solutions.

Gamble:  Another area I wanted to touch on was innovation, that’s another word that everyone can’t seem to get enough of.

Davis:  Oh yeah, that’s another one.

Gamble:  But in doing little bit of research, I’ve seen that Texas Children’s is one of the hospitals that took part in the South by Southwest Pediatric Health Pitch competition, and that’s really interesting to me. Can you talk a little bit about that experience?

Davis:  Yeah, we have a resource, James Hury. He basically works with providers or researchers who have awesome ideas they are working on developing or they’re working with a small company, or he works with small companies who don’t have a great deal of funding but they want to work with a very large organization like Texas Children’s. So I blame all this on James. James came to me — he comes to IT often and basically he bounces ideas off of us or he wants to know ‘Hey guys, are you working on anything like this? I have this company, it’s willing to fund something or they want a fund to start up — are you willing to put some resources on it?”

So he comes to me about South by Southwest. I’d heard of it before, and I said, ‘Sure, why not? Never did it before, but sure, we’re up for it, let’s do it.’ And I will tell you, it was an awesome experience to watch companies pitch their ideas...