Q&A with Guthrie Clinic Chief Digital Officer Terri Couts: “The Focus Should Be On the Patient.”

For health systems serving rural populations, there are many common themes, one of which is the need to do more with less. And while it may seem like a disadvantage, sometimes it’s quite the opposite. A perfect example is Guthrie Clinic, which earned the 2023 ECRI Health Technology Excellence Award for leveraging an AI-enhanced platform to address staffing shortages and improve patient care. “We’re not a large system with a ton of resources. We have to find ways to be nimble and do great things,” said Terri Couts, Chief Digital Officer, during a recent conversation with Kate Gamble, Managing Editor at healthsystemCIO.

They did. Like many organizations (especially in rural settings), buying an eICU solution wasn’t an option. And so, Couts’ team added some cameras and “a little bit of innovation,” and cobbled together “something very similar that can have a big impact.” And telesitting is just one facet of the digital health strategy that she believes will position the organization for success as care models evolve.

During the interview, Couts talked about how the virtual command center — called the Guthrie Pulse Center — aims to centralize functions, create synergies, and improve access to care; why her team is changing its focus from feeding people data to ‘fetch the data’; the key obstacles in implementing virtual nursing; and how she has benefited from her experience as a nurse.

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Key Takeaways



* On Guthrie Pulse Center: In addition to virtual nursing, centralized telemetry and telesitting, and transfer centers, Guthrie’s virtual command center will also house transport and staffing “so that as we manage patient flow, it can be centralized to support the whole system.”

* On virtual nursing’s benefits: Another use care for virtual nursing? The second-sign process for high-risk medications can shrink from 36 minutes to as little as 33 seconds by leveraging technology. “There have been so many quick wins.”

* On data and decision-making: As part of its analytics revamp, Guthrie is bringing data feeds into a data lake “so we can build out the governance around it with definition, ownership, and contributors,” said Couts, and ultimate enable users to “pull the data and aggregate it in a way that they can use it for whatever decision they’re trying to make.”

* On her role as CDO: “I’m able to help level set and make that connection to not just my end-users that ‘I hear you and we’re going to try to address this,’ but also to my staff, who needs to respond to that and respond in a way that’s compassionate and has empathy.”

* On healthcare’s future: “Care models have to change. We can’t continue to do what we’ve done in the past and expect to survive. And so how do we look at it a little differently — how do we rethink the process and then apply the technology that helps enable that?”



Q&A with Terri Couts, Chief Digital Officer, Guthrie Clinic

Gamble:  Hi Terri, thank you for carving out some time. We spoke at some point last year, but things change so quickly in this industry. I want to talk about what you guys are doing, especially around digital transformation.

Couts:  We’re launching our command center [Guthrie Pulse Center], which is housing virtual care models and an operations component to manage aspects from a system perspective.