Q&A with CIO Patrick Anderson, Part 1: “We Need Highly Available Systems.”

For Patrick Anderson, the opportunity to work with an organization that’s doing groundbreaking work with immunotherapy to transform the way cancer is detected and treated was a dream come true. But along with the ability to build decision support capabilities with genomics to determine precise pathways comes quite a daunting problem: harnessing and managing unfathomable amounts of data. It’s enough to turn a dream into a nightmare.

Fortunately, Anderson doesn’t see it that way. In fact, when he came to City of Hope about a year ago, he knew the challenges he’d face as CIO, which included upgrading the entire infrastructure. And while it’s an ongoing task, it’s one he and his team have embraced. Recently, we spoke with Anderson about the “permanent optimization strategy” in place at City of Hope, how he’s using reinforcement to connect IT staff with patients and families, as well as clinicians, and how his past experience helped him build the ultimate toolkit.

Chapter 1



* City of Hope’s “tremendous” growth

* Leveraging CAR T-cell therapy to “attack cancer cells”

* Challenges of being a research organization – “We’ve had to upgrade everything.”

* Data center modernization

* “We need to have highly available systems with excellent capacity.”

* Creating a new IT strategy

* Combining decision support with genomics to drive precision care



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Bold Statements

It requires that whole body of science and care and research to deliver a really effective immunotherapy program. That’s what we’re most proud of here at City of Hope. Our research is the foundation for our success.

I have to build enough capacity for the infrastructure and for the applications to meet this overwhelming demand for our services. It’s been quite interesting as we’ve had to figure out how to prioritize and literally upgrade our entire portfolio of systems.

The organization is growing. We’re hiring. We’re expanding our research. We’re expanding our care. We’re opening up new clinics constantly, and so we need to be able to have highly available systems with excellent capacity. That’s really what I’ve been driving since I’ve been here.

We really want to build this decision support capability with genomics to drive this precision care for each and every one of our patients.

Gamble:  Hi Patrick, thanks so much for joining us today. Can you give an overview of City of Hope?

Anderson:  City of Hope has been around for over a hundred years. Back in the 1970s, they conducted research that led to the creation of synthetic human insulin. That really put the City of Hope on the map. Since then, they’ve been pioneers in cancer research and cancer care. As cancer has become more prevalent, City of Hope has been growing tremendously.

About three or four years ago, we had one single campus here just east of Los Angeles. Now we have 30 locations and we are building a new state-of-the-art campus in Orange County, California. Now, although we’re geographically in Southern California, we’re serving patients from all around the world in various ways, leveraging various telemedicine technologies as well as second opinions and so forth.

People are lining up to come here because of our advanced therapies and our advanced research, along with the hundreds of clinical trials we have. That’s why we expanded to all those locations in the last several years — we couldn’t handle the demand. In fact, we’re rebuilding our entire campus here in Duarte, which is a small town east of Los Angeles, and building another hospital and research and large clinics in Orange County because the demand is just tremendous.

Recently, we were named the highest ranked cancer center in the Western United ...