Q&A with LCMC Health CIO Tanya Townsend, Part 2: “Let’s focus on how we make a difference.”

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.

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Key Takeaways:



* LCMC Health’s strategy in rolling out Epic across the enterprise was to “slowly but surely” demonstrate results over time. “It wasn’t to rip the Band-Aid off” and expect everything to be “magical.”

* Rather than rewriting the strategic plan every few years, Townsend’s approach has been to maintain the core objectives while “changing tactics or initiatives from year to year.”

* LCMC is leveraging its status as a teaching facility by recruiting residents as EHR champions and partnering them with new clinicians to learn the system.

* The lack of a standard patient identifier “has been a problem from the beginning of healthcare IT,” making interoperability “almost impossible to achieve.”

* One of the most important skills for current and aspiring CIOs is to “really understand the business of healthcare,” which Townsend hopes to build by encouraging her team to “get out of IT.”





Q&A with Tanya Townsend, Part 2 [Click here to view Part 1]

Gamble:  When you’re looking at forming an integrated network from independent hospitals, I imagine a lot of it is about building trust. How were you able to get over that hump? Did you have champions or super users?

Townsend:  Honestly, I think the biggest thing was results. Going through any type of change is going to bring about skepticism. Is this really going to be better? Is it going to be a cheaper, more efficient, and better experience? And so our strategy was slowly but surely proving it through incremental results over time. It wasn’t just rip the Band-Aid off and go live with Epic and everything’s magical. We had a lot of preliminary milestones going into that massive transformation. It was everything. Looking back it seems so simple, but part of the culture change is things like consolidating email platforms and changing our domain — even things like that came with some frustration, because it was part of the identity that had been so longstanding.

We also used the typical approach of standing up a steering committee and identifying the correct participants, and making sure you have the right service lines represented, and the right decision-making models in place — that whole governance model.

It’s an evolution. As you continue to mature with that process, it continues to advance and evolve over time.