Q&A with CIO Pamela McNutt, Part 2: “We Have to Be Able to Empower Patients.”

For many CIOs, there are about a million reasons not to get involved in advocacy. The most commonly cited, of course, is time. But to Pamela McNutt, who was instrumental in developing CHIME’s policy committee and has long been a champion for health IT legislation, those reasons are far outweighed by the positives. Not only does it help leaders stay educated on key issues, but by sharing “boots-on-the-ground experiences” with political leaders, CIOs are forging a better path for the entire industry.

Recently, healthsystemCIO spoke with McNutt about the enormous transformation healthcare has undergone in the past three decades – the vast majority of which she has spent with the same organization – and how she has evolved her leadership strategy. She also discusses the critical lessons she has learned about vendor management, the keys to working for a new CEO, and what excites and scares her most about the future.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* Focus on leveraging existing tools, not layering on new ones

* “The first question you really need to ask is, can this be done in Epic?”

* Eyeing predictive analytics

* Healthcare’s “digital revolution”

* Balancing interoperability with security

* Policy involvement: “It’s better to control your destiny that to have to react to it.”

* 26 years with Methodist

* “It feels like I’ve been in 3 different organizations”



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Bold Statements

You’re bombarded with opportunities to layer things onto your Epic system, but the first question you really need to ask yourself is, can this be done in Epic?

With this digital revolution we’re seeing, we have to be able to empower patients to be able to access and use their data, and access us digitally.

We discovered it does make an impact to get involved; to talk with people at CMS, to develop those relationships with ONC, and to have meetings with them. They’re hungry to hear how it’s really going out there.

I would rather be involved in helping steer this or giving feedback to make what the government is putting into regulation a better product, than just sit back and react.

That’s what has kept it exciting — having strong core values and mission, while also having strategic initiatives that are exciting. That is what has kept me here.

Gamble:  Right now, what would you say are the key priorities for your team?

McNutt:  We have two primary initiatives. One is to continue to leverage the tools we have in Epic. In other words, we’re not looking for outside tools to layer over Epic until we’ve optimized all the new features and functionalities. Like many organizations across the country, we’ve recently gone live with Epic 2018. That brought a lot of new features and functionalities, and we need to work on exploiting all of those. We also need to exploit all the other features inside of Epic when it comes to things like predictive analytics. We can use their data analytics tool to a much deeper degree than we have. We need to work on all of these things.

So that’s probably our key focus — optimizing everything we have. Epic is now on this quarterly release cycle of even more features and functions, and it would be foolish for us not to leverage the tools that we already own. I think everybody’s looking at this. You’re bombarded with opportunities to layer things onto your Epic system, but the first question you really need to ask yourself is, can this be done in Epic?

 

Gamble:  Sure. It’s a big investment.

McNutt:  That’s the journey we’re on. Epic, in particular,