Transforming Our Culture to Meet Our Technology Needs

What does it mean to be a strong and steadfast partner? That's a question we've examined closely within our information technology group over the last year as we've embarked on the most comprehensive organizational transformation in our department's history. After spending a great deal of time listening to your feedback and taking stock of our strengths and weaknesses, we've recognized that, although we continue to lead our peers with award-winning healthcare IT capabilities, we can do far better. We are committed to improving our processes, our services, and our alignment with your technology needs. That's why we're currently completely redesigning our entire organization. Over the last few months we've:

• Established a new leadership team and organizational structure aligned with SHC's needs for continued growth, innovation, and service improvement.
• Initiated a complete insourcing of our application support work, including Epic, that was previously managed by Accenture – strengthening our team with talent we are recruiting and managing locally as our own employees.
• Established the leadership and recruiting plan for an internal custom application development team to drive competitive differentiation with technology.
• Created a stronger, more tightly coordinated, and more accountable IT presence by integrating IT personnel from other hospital departments into a centralized IT structure.
• Built the foundation for a new department culture grounded in partnership, collaboration, continuous improvement, and lean management methods.

We've made these changes with a focus on improving our capabilities and strengthening our partnership with the School of Medicine and LPCH information technology groups. Although these changes are significant, our work has just begun. It's going to take time for us to fully recruit and reorganize to reach our transformation goals. With a focus on continuous improvement, we look forward to working together to continue to support you in providing leading edge and coordinated care and to heal humanity through science and compassion, one patient at a time.

By Pravene Nath, MD, MSE, CMIO & Interim CIO, Assistant Clinical Professor