Q&A with LCMC Health CIO Tanya Townsend, Part 1: “We can’t go back to the way things were.”

It may seem counterintuitive to hear a healthcare IT leader say she encourages her team to “get out of IT.” But to Tanya Townsend, who has held the CIO role at LCMC Health since 2014, it makes complete sense. She believes the most critical skillset for digital health leaders is to “understand the business of healthcare,” which means getting out of firefighting mode and focusing on “how we make a difference for our clinicians and our patients,” and tell that story.

During a recent interview, Townsend talked about LCMC’s significant growth – and what that has meant from an IT perspective; the most important lessons they learned during the pandemic; and how her team is ‘Putting the Patient First.’

She also discussed the keys to change management in a large organization, the challenges they faced moving several independent hospitals to an integrated platform, what she hopes to accomplish during her tenure as CHIME Board Chair (which begins in January of 2022), and how she has benefited from her involvement with the organization.

For those planning to attend the CHIME21 Summer Forum, Townsend is serving as a moderator for the Opening Keynote Panel on Wednesday, June 16 at 11 am EDT. The panel will include member stories from Richard Corbridge (CIO, Boots IT UK), Angela Diop (VP, Information Systems, Unity Health Care) and Aaron Miri (CIO, Dell Medical School & UT Health Austin, University of Texas at Austin). For more information on the event — which will be broadcast live from three locations — please click here.

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Key Takeaways



* As LCMC continues to grow, IT’s primary focus is on “patient engagement, patient access, and expanding our virtual care and telemedicine capabilities.”

* What’s just as important, is partnering with clinicians “to ensure we’re providing the right capabilities” and to ensure ease of use with all of their tools.

* Because LCMC put in the work to move to a fully integrate network, users were able to implement best practices and share data across organizations. “If the pandemic had hit a couple of years ago, it would have been very difficult, if not impossible.”

* A key lesson learned from Covid? Organizations know how rapidly they can pivot and implement solutions. “We can’t go back to the norm of going through a long bureaucratic approval process.”

* Townsend came to LCMC in 2014 “with a vision of integrating this network of hospitals and building a shared services model and a technology roadmap.” Six and a half years later, “we’re an integrated delivery network.”





Q&A with Tanya Townsend

Gamble:  Let’s start with a brief overview of LCMC Health — what you have in terms of hospitals, where you’re located, etc.? 

Townsend:  LCMC Health stands for Louisiana Children’s Medical Center. We are a six-hospital system based in the New Orleans market. Our founding hospital is Children’s Hospital of New Orleans, which is a dedicated pediatric facility. The other five hospitals are all in the adult market, and have a wide range of services. We have the only Level 1 trauma center and teaching facility in this area, in partnership with Children’s and local academic partners. And we have a number of other services for the other four adult hospitals in this market. That’s a little bit about who we are.

 

Patient experience

Gamble:  What do you consider to be your top priorities at this point?

Townsend:  We have a consumerism strategy that we ca...