Q&A with CIO Aaron Miri, Part 1: How UT Austin Used “Battlefield Triage” to Weather the Storm

In recent months, some have referred to the rapid adoption of digital health tools as a “silver lining” of Covid-19. Aaron Miri, however, sees it a bit differently. He believes the pandemic has “galvanized and rallied everybody around common causes of humanity,” and has helped increase awareness of healthcare IT’s critical role in care delivery.

“You have to be in the pilot seat,” he said during a podcast interview. “If you’re not, the ship is going to crash.” And that doesn’t just mean being in the trenches with your team; it means ensuring they know the value of the work they do, and that it’s appreciated.

For Miri, that opportunity came a few weeks ago when Texas faced massive power outages and severely cold temperatures, forcing leadership to – once again – pivot quickly to make sure frontline workers received adequate support. Recently, he spoke with healthsystemCIO about the challenges in dealing with a crisis on top of a crisis, the “little things” leaders can do to boost morale, why it’s more important than ever to set the right tone when it comes to work-life balance, and how he hopes IT will be able to leverage the “goodwill” it has built during the past year.

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Key Takeaways



* When the cold snap hit, UT Health Austin went into “battlefield triage” mode by opening up research buildings to provide shelter for those with no heat or power.

* Making a swift decision to administer vaccines to students before they could expire demonstrated the organization’s agility and willingness to help out the community.

* The pandemic has forced IT to become accustomed to working at a “fast, unpredictable pace,” and has shown an incredible ability to adjust to different situations.

* With healthcare teams having run what feels like a marathon for well over a year, it’s imperative that leaders encourage time off. “We need our IT teams. We need our janitorial staff, our engineering staff and our finance and HR teams. We need them.”

* “Healthcare is told in stories.” Leaders need to “bring people together, drive items forward and recognize and see them. That’s humanity. That’s what this is about.”





Q&A with Aaron Miri, Part 1

Gamble:  Walk me through what happened with the recent cold snap in Texas. How was your organization affected, and when did you know it was going to be a major event?

Miri:  It’s interesting; going into it, the weather forecast for the area showed that we were going to have a freeze and possibly some snow and some ice, but it really wasn’t expected to last beyond the weekend. So from our perspective, we were running vaccine clinics during the weekends. Some of ambulatory clinics were open, as well as the hospitals and EDs. But in Texas, it’s par for the course that when we get an ice or snow event, it’s a few days at most. The state is really not equipped to handle ice or snow appropriately. And so we know it may slow things down or delay some appointments but I don’t think anybody had an idea, probably until the end of the weekend or Monday, that it was about to get really bad.

When you’re in single-digit temperatures for a sustained duration, there’s only so much you can do for buildings that were built 60 or 70 years ago and were not designed for this type of climate. We saw a lot of water main breaks, and a lot of people started panicking because the electricity situation became a problem. UT has its own power grid and source of energy, and so a lot of our campus was able to stay open (including the dorms) and we were able to offer shelter to a lot of...