Q&A with Dr. Richard Zane, Part 1: “It’s about helping providers make better decisions.”

Finding the right innovation partner is not easy. In fact, the reality is that when you vet as many companies as UCHealth has as part of its ongoing goal to disrupt and reinvent healthcare, you’re going to “kiss a lot of frogs.”

But if the goals and values are aligned, and the right intent and expectations are established upfront, it can result in a great relationship, said Richard Zane, MD, who holds the dual role of Chief Innovation Officer at University of Colorado Health (UCHealth) and academic chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. In a recent interview, he spoke about the ultimate objectives of digital health and intelligence, the guiding principles with any technology solution, and the one component that matters most when working with clinicians.

Dr. Zane also discussed what it was like to be UCHealth’s first Chief Innovation Officer, why leaders shouldn’t always target the “sexy” projects, and the symbiotic relationship he has established with Chief Information Officer Steve Hess.

Chapter 1



* Dual roles: chief innovation officer & academic chair

* Focus on digital health & intelligence

* “It’s making better decisions around healthcare.”

* Key questions with innovation

* Guiding principle: “It has to be easier, not harder.”

* Deploying rapidly to meet provider needs

* “Iterate and validate.”

* Investing in startups & participating in the process



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Bold Statements

If one of the other 4,000 hospitals or 400 health systems in the country has solved this problem, I want to know how they solved it. I want to learn from them, and I don’t have to reinvent the wheel or the algorithm to do that.

While I don’t employ a huge number of data scientists, I have a lot of great healthcare providers who are willing to change and adopt new ways of doing things.

It’s the concept of valuing clinician and provider input, rapidly iterating, rapidly validating, and having zero qualms about saying, ‘this did not work.’

It enabled us to see things like, do doctors use it? Do they opt out of it? Is it so user friendly that they don’t even know they’re using it? One of our guiding principles is that we will never ask a provider to leave their clinical workflow.

The reason why infusion centers were a great first step is, from a cultural change management perspective, it didn’t require providers to act differently, and it didn’t require patients to act differently.

Gamble: Hi Dr. Zane, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us about the work your team is doing. Let’s start by talking about your roles and how you balance them.

Zane:  Sure, I have two roles. One is innovation officer for University of Colorado Health (UCHealth). We’re one of the larger systems in Colorado, with 12 hospitals up and down the Front Range. We’re a relatively new healthcare system, formed in 2012. I’m also the academic chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. In that role, I have oversight for a large clinical department, which includes probably 180 faculty members, a residency training program, research program, and educational program.

In my chief innovation officer role, I work almost exclusively in the area of digital health and intelligence. Interestingly, digital health and intelligence have come to mean everything and nothing to people. I like to say that we work on intelligence sort of writ large, meaning we focus in a very pragmatic and ethnographic way at the frontline of healthcare delivery and how we can help providers, executive managers, make better decisions. That’s how I describe it.