Christus Health CIO discusses how IT supports business strategy (Part 1)
[audio http://website.guild.im/williams/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2010/03/christus13.mp3]
In this podcast interview, Christus Health's SVP/CIO George Conklin describes how his 44-hospital system leverages IT to support its business. The overall organization has a three-part strategy:
- Revamp acute care to lower costs and boost quality
- Shift toward non-acute settings including mall-based retail clinics
- Expand internationally, starting with Northern Mexico
The IT group seeks to provide just the right information at the time and place it's needed, across the continuum of care. A health information exchange (HIE) architecture is rolling out, and will include clinical decision support and data aggregation capabilities along with the ability to present information.Christus has a head start in generating useful information from large data sets, thanks to a "massive" data and protocol standardization effort it undertook about five years ago. As a result of the effort, the organization can extract normalized data from its systems relatively painlessly. This capability has made Christus an attractive development partner for Humedica, a clinical informatics company I profiled late last year.Christus has worked with Humedica on the development of large-scale databases and analytical frameworks that enable Christus to make better clinical decisions.