"We are looking at how we can give the clinicians more self-service analytic tools for them to “slice and dice” their data without having to come to I.T. for every report or dashboard they need."

KAREN GREEN
CIO
Brooks Rehabilitation

Karen is the Chief Information Officer at Brooks Rehabilitation. Karen started as a system analyst in banking and moved into healthcare, where she has worked for over 23 years designing and implementing IT solutions and process improvements for a variety of care settings and service areas. At Brooks, she leads the Technology Services Group in planning and aligning IT enabled business initiatives and Healthcare analytics with the strategic goals of the organization.

Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 and expectations.

My organization is in the business of healthcare, and we have been challenged with leveraging technology more to improve the quality of care, sharing information to improve service delivery while protecting patient privacy. Vendors have been buying up great technology companies to add them to their offerings, but they haven’t done a great job of integrating them into their products. I would recommend that they develop more strategic partnerships with solution providers instead of buying up a good technology solution, carving out only the piece they want.

The areas in business environment where solutions do not yet exist or not up to the mark, and which if existed, would've made job easier.

While privacy and security of data have been entrenched into technical safeguards for a while, we have not eliminated the potential for breaches and risk areas that exist outside of IT infrastructure. Healthcare is experiencing large fines for lack of policy, but it is the lack of awareness enforcement and practice of that policy that will ultimately drive how high the fine is. The healthcare user still thinks in terms of the traditional desktop as their access to information, and they are not even asking if their applications work on the mobile device they want to use. When they start asking for mobile applications that can meet their needs, then we can discuss what device makes sense to deliver those applications.

Technology Trends Impacting Enterprise Business Environment

We have grown in the number of applications and technologies we deploy both cloud based and internally developed and hosted. The demand for performance, quality, and cost reductions using analytics and dashboards has exploded, and it is getting tough to keep up with it. We are looking at how we can give the clinicians more self-service analytics tools for them to “slice and dice” their data without having to come to I.T. for every report or dashboard they need.

My roles and responsibilities as a CIO

I have recently described my role as CIO, an "integrator", with an increased need to bring together systems, data, and processes across distinct business lines that have a shared goal of providing services as a "single system of care" to our patients. I have to constantly be aware of what these business lines are doing, where they are growing, and what technology service will be needed to support them, not just this week , but over the next few years. We have established governance for our initiatives through a divisional Project Advisory Council that really scrutinizes the business value before we move forward.

Lessons I learned as a CIO that can help you

CIOs are in a great position to make a difference and “change the world” for their organizations. We have to build awareness and ownership with technology enabled initiatives and get the business units involved in the decision making. You have to build up trust equity with them and help them understand that even if IT is ready to move ahead, they may not be. Sometimes technology isn’t the right solution, and you have to point that out. The CIO can get people to think differently, as well as help them define the business value in a way they haven’t thought of before. Helping the business discover and describe what they truly need can empower them to change the world as they know it, with or without technology.