Q&A with CIO Ray Lowe, Part 2: “It’s a lot of Communication, Training and Support.”

“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



* One of the early lessons learned in training physicians on video visits? Distance learning doesn’t always work, which means other avenues must be explored. “It’s a lot of communication, training, and support.”

* AltaMed is about 70 percent finished with a “very broad technology uplift” that started in 2018 with modernizing the EHR.

* An Epic customer since 2018, AltaMed is the first US-based healthcare organization to go live with its social care platform, and is leveraging Epic’s translation tools to provide “a much richer experience” for multilingual patients.

* For today’s CIO, it’s essential to know which technologies are being adopted across different industries and how to incorporate them into healthcare. “That’s what we’re expected to do and what we should know how to do.”





Q&A with Ray Lowe [Click here to view Part 1]

Gamble:  As far as the providers, and all the changes they’re going through, how was your team able to stay on top of that and provide the assistance they needed? I can’t imagine it was simple.

Lowe:  I’ll give you one example. As we’re talking about a patient-centric mobile first strategy, originally we were doing more Web-based type training for providers. We were asking them to use their admin time to learn what we’re doing from a tele-visit perspective with things like the Covid-19 fast lane. But we weren’t as effective as we needed to be.

And so I had my Epic training team go out and work with providers in the clinics so that they had more hands-on training, because distance training and distance learning doesn’t always work. As we introduced more disruptive technology like telehealth video visits, we selected two locations as centers of excellence.

Tele-video is not as easy as it sounds. It should work like magic, but with any video meeting, you hear, ‘Where do I click,’ ‘What do I do,’ ‘What does the experience look like,