Q&A with Dr. Eve Cunningham of Providence: “Let’s Talk about the Problems We’re Trying to Solve.”

“Technology is not the problem. There is so much amazing technology out there that can solve so many problems.”

And yet, clinicians remain increasingly frustrated. It’s precisely why Eve Cunningham, MD, left her role as CMO of a medical group in 2021. The technology that was being implemented wasn’t resonating at the point of care. The reason, she believes, is that clinicians weren’t getting involved, despite the fact that “most of the problems that need to be solved are clinical.”

Cunningham, an OB-GYN by training, started on a journey to change that. First by joining Providence’s Corporate Development team, which provides clinical strategy, innovation and product development support for its partnerships and incubations, then assuming her current post as Chief of Virtual Care and Digital Health. She also serves as Founder of MedPearl, a groundbreaking clinical decision support tool that aids in referrals and provides physicians with “specialized knowledge personalized to the patient’s EMR data.”

And she’s nowhere near finished.

Recently, Cunningham spoke with Kate Gamble Managing Editor at healthsystemCIO, about her team’s core objectives, particularly around virtual nursing, the importance of effective change management, and the genesis of MedPearl, what she termed as a ‘GitHub for doctors.’ She also talked about her advocacy efforts around telehealth and why more clinicians are – and should be – taking on digital leadership roles.

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Bold Statements

Once we were able to go in, prove it out, and then demonstrate the value proposition, people pretty much got in line and asked, ‘can I go next?’

You can’t underestimate the change management piece. I feel like a big part of what we do is change. Change management and supporting people through change — especially when people are already experiencing burnout and feeling overwhelmed.

We developed a platform in which we can create, govern, maintain, and collaborate as a clinician community to create digitally consumable, context-aware clinical content in a no-code environment. It’s basically like a GitHub for doctors.

All of these things were happening with technology, but none of it resonated with the point of care and with solving problems for the clinicians. The reason is because clinicians weren’t getting involved. And yet, most of the problems that need to be solved are clinical.

Twenty percent of our visits at Providence are done virtually. I testified on Capitol Hill early this year because if the reimbursement for telehealth expires at the end of this year, it will create complete chaos across our organization.

 

Gamble:  Hi Eve, thanks so much for joining us. Let’s start with some information about your scope and responsibilities as Chief of Virtual Care and Digital.

Cunningham:  Sure. So, I’m an OB GYN physician by training, and I lead virtual care and digital health. At Providence, we have a very large portfolio of products and services that are specifically focused around care transformation and how we get clinical care to transform and change the way we do traditional operations. Under the hood, we have three different buckets of things we do. We own the full operations enterprise services, including large-scale inpatient (mostly) telemedicine: tele-neurology, tele-psychiatry, tele-ICU, and tele-infectious disease.

Interestingly, we provide services to more than 90 hospitals....