Q&A with CIO Zafar Chaudry, MD, Chapter 3: “I’ve Always Been Drawn to Pediatrics.”

The reality of working in the IT department of a health system — which is often located in a different building or even a different section of town than the hospital — is that it’s easy to become “detached.” When you don’t see patients on a daily basis, it’s nearly impossible to understand how technology impacts their experience, and what can be done to improve it.

It’s precisely why one of Dr. Zafar Chaudry’s first priorities as CIO at Seattle Children’s was to invite caregivers to join the IT advisory committee. But he didn’t stop there; Dr. Chaudry’s team began holding quarterly educational sessions during which parents of patients share their stories to help convey the critical role all staff members play in providing quality care. Each time, it has left the team feeling “energized,” he says.

It’s just one example of how Dr. Chaudry is leveraging the diverse experience he has gained during his career to create a better environment. Recently, he spoke with healthsystemCIO about his team’s top priorities (including an Epic migration), why it’s so important to get the messaging right, and what it was like to go from England to the Pacific Northwest.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3



* European vs US care models: “We treat patients the same way.”

* Working in pediatrics – “I’ve always been drawn to it.”

* His diverse career path

* “You have to learn about different people before you can work and gel as a team.”

* Shift to value-based care

* Technology’s role in driving down costs

* Digital health – “It’s very exciting if we truly embrace it.”

* Seattle’s “mix of different cultures”



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Bold Statements

I’ve always been drawn to working in pediatric hospitals. Every day when you come to work, you know why you’re here.

I’ve tried to balance my career between different health systems so that I can learn. I’ve also been on the vendor side and the provider side, and learned a lot of lessons along the way. It’s quite interesting to watch how healthcare is delivered in different parts of the world.

People are moving care outside of their walls. We don’t want children to come to our emergency room as the first port of call. We’d rather treat them in the community at primary care or urgent care facilities and keep those volumes low, because the cost of treating someone in an ED is so much higher than it is in other setting.

This whole digital health world is very exciting if we truly embrace it. We’ve got to start looking at mainstreaming and also reimbursing for the type of technologies using the data that we have, in order to make better decisions.

If you look ahead to 2019 and 2020, the whole concept of taking voice application, artificial intelligence for decision-making, and robotic process automation practices and trying to standardize them is something we need to focus on.

Chaudry:  In terms of healthcare being healthcare, we treat patients the same way. There are more wait lists in the European model than there is in the US model, depending on specialty, of course. But in terms of quality of care, if you look at the rankings the World Health Organization does rankings every year, publicly-funded health systems still have very good quality and patient outcome scores compared with any other systems. And we’re using similar solutions. At Cambridge, we did a big Epic implementation, and were using Oracle as the ERP system.