For the past few years, we’ve seen a significant evolution in the role of the CIO. And although it isn’t always obvious, there are times when it couldn’t be clearer just how much has changed. Case in point: Aaron Miri, who has held the role at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin for the past two years.
During a recent interview about his team’s efforts in response to Covid, he expressed the same passion while discussing the human aspect of leadership as he did while talking about the groundbreaking 3D-printing face shield imitative. When it comes to managing people, Miri believes the need to “tough it out and soldier on” can hinder relationships, and that during difficult times, it’s important to “be vulnerable” and “talk to your team in a way they understand.”
He also talks about how the innovative culture at UT Health Austin has enabled his team to flourish, their strategy when it comes to contact tracing, the enormous potential telemedicine offers in terms of health equity, and why he feels like two years has “flown by.”
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Key Takeaways

* After partnering with a Seattle-based company to roll out a contact tracing initiative, UT Health Austin went back and revamped processes to incorporate analytics an algorithms to more effectively identify potential Covid cases.
* One of the most critical aspects of a successful contact tracing program is in building trust, which UT Health Austin was able to do by offering multilingual options. “We took the time to make sure they felt safe.”
* IT leaders have a responsibility to ensure staff feel safe and comfortable, especially those who are on site, and let them know they have leadership’s support.
* Although reimbursement has been a key component in telehealth’s rapid growth, increasing users’ “comfort factor” has been just as important.

Q&A with Aaron Miri, Part 2 (Click here to read Part 1)
Gamble:  Let’s talk about the contact tracing initiative. How did that come about?
Miri:  It was interesting. We have some of the brightest physicians, clinicians, and researchers I’ve ever had a chance to work alongside of; I’m constantly in awe of them and learning from them. It was the beginning of March when Covid first broke out here in Austin. By the second week of March, I received a phone call from one of our chiefs of family medicine, who said, ‘We really need to do home temperature monitoring for patients,’ specifically those who have through UT Health Austin that we suspect are positive or are awaiting rest results. He said, ‘We need to see what their temperature is so that we can intervene quickly, and we can dispatch people proactively to keep them out of the ER.’ The thought process in those early days was, if you can catch a temperature spike early, you may be able to intervene with various medications before they potentially present to the ER in really bad shape.
We partnered with a company out of Seattle to do exactly that. They had been doing hypertension monitoring, and they pivoted to COVID-19 monitoring because they already had a platform built for it. It made a lot of sense. It was quick and easy. There was an iOS app and an Andriod app, and developed a web app shortly thereafter. We put out apps in Spanish, which was very important to the city of Austin.
But right on the heels of that — not two weeks after ...