Q&A with CIO Ray Lowe, Part 1: “We’re moving very quickly to the digital edge.”

“It’s a great time to be a CIO.”

Since March of 2020, healthcare has gone through arguably the most dramatic period of change in the history of modern medicine. Care was reinvented as alternate sites were rapidly created to accommodate surges of patients, and digital technology adoption rates soared to new heights. And behind the scenes, IT teams worked around the clock to provide much-needed support for frontline care providers and patients.

And yet, in spite of all that — or perhaps because of it — there’s nowhere else Ray Lowe wants to be. “With our thought leadership and partnerships, we can think through how to solve many complex problems,” he said during a recent interview.

Part of that is a willingness to honestly assess strategies, and pivot if necessary — something his team did in the early days of Covid-19 when it became clear that web-based training for telehealth wasn’t the best method for all physicians. And so Epic training teams were sent out to provide hands-on instruction, and centers of excellence were created to help extend these best practices across the organization.

During the discussion, Lowe talked about the challenges AltaMed has faced in rolling out virtual visits — particularly for those in underserved communities; the “modernization effort” the organization has been going through since 2018; why collaborating with other C-suite leaders is so critical; and what he expects to see in the next few years.

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Key Takeaways



* Every organization faced challenges during Covid, but for AltaMed, going from 3,000 visits per day to almost zero “was a significant shift.”

* Through its partnership with AT&T, AltaMed was able to use retail stores to provide the connectivity and power to run Covid clinics and “find a way to make them work seamlessly.”

* The pandemic has caused leaders to take a new approach to vendor relationships, focusing less on transactions and more on outcomes. “It was a leap of faith for many of them.”

* Although telehealth adoption has been critical in helping patients continue to receive care, it’s not a blanket solution. “There’s a real digital divide out there in the underserved in the low-income areas where broadband is not as ubiquitous or as available.”





Q&A with Ray Lowe, Part 1

Lowe:  Good morning, I’m Ray Lowe, senior vice president and CIO at AltaMed Health Services in Los Angeles, California. AltaMed Health Services is the largest FQHC in the country. We primarily serve multi-ethnic, underserved and low-income patients. We serve over 300,000 patients in our community, primarily in East Los Angeles and Orange County. Our patients are many of the essential workers who have been affected so critically during the Covid pandemic.

We provide primary care services, pediatric services, women health, HIV-AIDS services, and elder care programs.

AltaMed started in 1969 as the East L.A. Barrio Free Clinic; at that time there was no healthcare in the East Los Angeles area. We’ve grown to have over 50 sites, with more one million visits a year.

 

Gamble:  Every organization was impacted in different ways by Covid. Can you talk about how AltaMed was affected, and how your strategy changed?

Lowe:  When the pandemic hit in March, it was a significant shift. Like many other healthcare systems, people stopped showing up in our clinics. When you’re providing primary care services and you go from having over 3,000 visits a day to almost zero, the company has to turn on a dime to support not only our patients a...