Podcast Interview with CIO JD Whitlock, Part 1: “You Can’t Do Everything.”

If you aren’t willing to say ‘no’ once in a while, perhaps the CIO role – especially at a relatively small pediatric organization – isn’t for you. Because the reality is that it’s going to happen more than once in a while, and so being able to make tough decisions is a requirement.

There are, however, advantages when you’re a David in a sea of Goliaths. For one thing, “you get used to McGyver-ing things at a smaller facility,” said JD Whitlock, CIO at Dayton Children’s. “It’s nice to have those tools in your tool box.” Another benefit is being able to move quickly, he noted in a recent interview, during which Whitlock discussed his team’s strategy in adopting an enterprise imaging architecture, how Dayton is collaborating with pediatric organizations through an innovation incubator, and why he believes it’s “irresponsible” for leaders to focus 100 percent on Covid.

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Key Takeaways



* After the initial ramp-up of telehealth during Covid-19, the focus is on now on “optimizing it,” which means going beyond simply doing visits virtually, and making sure they’re integrated with clinical workflow.

* Because the ultimate goal is a long-term solution, selecting an enterprising imaging architecture is “a major decision” that should be approached methodically.”

* Clinical imaging architecture isn’t built in a day. Although Dayton hopes to have the basic architecture in place during the current fiscal year, it doesn’t mean every image will be archived by 2021.

* One of the biggest challenges facing CIOs, particularly in smaller organizations, is to set realistic expectations. Rather than trying to do everything, the key is to tackle one or two things, “then get around to everything else as it makes sense.”



 

Q&A with JD Whitlock, Part 1



Gamble:  What would you say are your most pressing priorities from an IT standpoint?

Whitlock:  Obviously we can’t avoid the topic of Covid-19. As you and I joked about during the prep for the call, it’s getting a bit repetitive. But it’s a reality at Dayton Children’s, as it is everywhere. We all ramped up telehealth, and now we’re in the phase of figuring out what that looks like for the long haul — how do we optimize telehealth and go beyond simple visits? How do we make sure video visits are integrated with clinical workflow to the extent possible, so it can more easily become part of their daily lives? Just like anything else associated with electronic health record, that’s a never-ending journey of optimization there.

Another big project is enterprise imaging. Like a lot of other health systems, we have a stovepipe storage situation for medical images that sort of grew up over time. We are in a position where our PACS needs a refresh, and so the smart way of doing that is to acquire a vendor-neutral archive before we do an upgrade so that we can do that PACS migration into a vendor-neutral archive — or as we call it, a clinical image archive.

That’s a big acquisition for us. Because the whole point of an image archive is that you’ll be happy with that architecture for a really long time, and you can plug and play different PACS and different imaging modalities over time. That’s a major decision, and we’re going about it very methodically. And as we had our budget discussions for FY 21, which started in July, we were severely constrained financially. But our leadership decided that although we have to cut a lot of corners in other places, we really need to go forward with enterprise imaging.