Q&A with CMIO Patrick Woodard, Part 1: “It’s Our Job to Support Our Teams as Best We Can.”

As healthcare and technology become more complex, “it’s going to require a lot of hand-holding.”

Much has been made — and rightfully so — of the enormous strides healthcare IT has taken in the past year to improve the consumer experience and help individuals feel more connected with their health. There’s a lot to be learned from industries that offer the “seamless experience” users have come to expect.

With healthcare, however, the stakes are higher, and there are considerations that don’t arise in travel or hospitality, one of which is the digital divide, according to Patrick Woodard, MD, CMIO and VP of Clinical Systems at Renown Health. He believes health systems have an obligation to “recognize that the ones for whom we are often architecting solutions may not be the ones who benefit most from them.”

During a recent interview, Dr. Woodard talked about what IT and clinical leaders must do to ensure they’re not “standing in the way,’ while also ensuring they’re thinking “like a business.” He also discussed Renown’s experience in distributing the Covid-19 vaccine, how they were able to remain focused on strategic objectives, and how he has benefited from previous experiences.

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Key Takeaways



* The fact that Renown Health already had plans in place for telehealth and leveraging technology “to increase collaboration among staff working in different locations” provided pivotal during the early days of Covid-19.

* Renown was able to deploy telehealth because three key pieces were in place: “It worked for patients, payers and providers. Because we were able to hit all three, it worked.”

* Despite encountering some hurdles, Woodard wouldn’t change anything that was done when rolling out the vaccine. “Every decision was made with the amount of information we had at the time.”

* During a crisis, leaders must be able to tend to the urgent while also looking into the future. “It’s our job to make sure the organization continues to progress over the next several years.”





Q&A with Patrick Woodard, MD

Gamble:  Let’s start with an overview of Renown Health — where you’re located, what you have in terms of hospitals, things like that.

Woodard:  Absolutely. I’m the chief medical information officer and VP of clinical systems at Renown Health. We’re located in Reno, Nevada. The state of Nevada is such a geographically broad region that we’re actually are more of a regional hospital for everything north of Clark County, which is where Las Vegas is located. We operate that community, and we are grateful to be able to provide services for rural Nevadans, as well as those in the frontier who have difficulty accessing healthcare. We have two acute care hospitals, a rehab hospital and around 70 clinic sites. We also have an insurance division called Hometown Health that provides insurance services to our community here.

 

Gamble:  I did certainly want to talk about COVID, how it has impacted your strategy and your organization.  I guess, first, I would say that from your perspective, can you talk about like what happened as far as core objectives and things just having to pivot, as everyone likes to say now?

Woodard:  Absolutely. We were fortunate that, over the course of a few years, we had put together a really strong roadmap for what we wanted to do organizationally in terms of our strategy. Of course, three years ago when we started that work, we didn’t know there was going to be a pandemic in the middle of it.

We did take some time last March and April to foc...