Podcast: Sanford Health CDO Jared Antczak on Removing Friction, “Website Manner,” and Healthcare’s Biggest Flaw

In most – if not all – industries, incorporating technology has led to more productivity and increased efficiency.

For healthcare, however, this has not been the case, according to Jared Antczak, Chief Digital Officer at Sanford Health. “As we’ve added more technology, it has seen less productivity,” he said. One of the biggest drivers? An emphasis on digitization over digital transformation, which started with the rush to implement electronic records. “We took existing workflows that were either on paper or on a different tool, and lifted and shifted them into a new tool without really fundamentally asking some of the hard questions.”

The good news is that there’s a tremendous opportunity to “apply digital transformation to simplify and remove some of the complexity and some of the non-value-added processes,” Antczak said. During a podcast interview with Kate Gamble, Managing Editor at healthsystemCIO, he talked about how Sanford Health is leveraging digital technologies to make care more accessible, affordable, and equitable across its sizeable footprint—and doing it in a way that answers the hard questions.

He also discussed the benefits of being in a rural environment; the advantages of having both a dedicated CIO and CDO; what a fast-food app can teach healthcare about engagement; and the time he almost became a physician.

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Key Takeaways



* On accessibility challenges: “The sacrifice of time and resources required to make that pilgrimage across really hazardous roads in the wintertime, or take time away from work [or time away from the harvest], or find childcare and reliable transformation — all of those things can really compound to create barriers.”

* On Sanford’s $350 million virtual care initiative: [It will] allow us to accelerate some of the great work that we’re already doing and double down to ensure we’re helping to provide care when, where, and how our patients want it and need it.”

* On ‘website manner’: “What does it take to connect with a patient through a camera or a digital screen and still make them feel important? What does it take to establish a relationship with them and make them feel heard and validated? Things like that go a long way toward making patients feel safe.”

* On digital transformation: “It addresses the people, the process, and the technology holistically, and it fundamentally transforms the business and the care delivery model. It doesn’t just super impose technology onto existing labor-intensive processes.”

* On having a CIO & CDO: “It allows us to focus resources and attention across the spectrum of technology to ensure that we have a balance approach, meaning that we’re focusing on not only keeping the lights on … it’s a really nice balance that allows us to kind of ensure that we’re doing the right things.”





Q&A with Sanford Health CDO Jared Antczak

Gamble:  Hi Jared, thank you for taking some time to talk. Why don’t you start by just giving an overview of the organization — the size, where you’re located, things like that.

Antczak:  Sanford Health is actually the largest rural health system in the United States. Our headquarters is in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. We have a geographic footprint that extends about 250,000 square miles across parts of South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Iowa, where we serve well over a million patients through our 47 medical centers and about 2,800 employee providers. If you can envision,