Don’t lose sight of the ultimate goal.
For CIOs, who have spent the past six months scrambling to implement tools that enable providers to practice care, all while establishing a remote workforce and ensuring the lights are kept on, keeping an eye toward the future may seem impossible. Or at the very least, counterintuitive. But if the organization is to thrive — and not just survive — it’s precisely what needs to happen, according to Robert Eardley, CIO at University Hospitals.
Taking inspiration from author Jim Collins, Eardley believes leaders who are focused mainly on completing the next project on-time and under budget are at risk of missing the big picture. On the other hand, those focused on making “a series of good decisions build on top of each other” can help their teams achieve success.
During a recent interview, Eardley spoke with healthsystemCIO about why it’s so critical to think long-term, what he considers to be the top qualities in future leaders, and the keys to successful change management. He also talked about the evolution of consumer engagement (and the role IT plays), how UH is working to keep healthy patients at home, and his thoughts on the power of ‘need.’
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Key Takeaways

* The ability to access an ICU staffed by an intensivist from a remote location has been a game changer for University Hospitals during the pandemic.
* One of the key lessons learned during Covid-19? “People are really apt to embrace change and absorb technology when it meets their needs, and when it’s simple and intuitive.”
* Going forward, consumers and health system leaders will have to “figure out together” the equilibrium when it comes to which appointments can remain virtual, and which require a physical component.
* IT shouldn’t be viewed as a division, but rather, a computerization of clinical and work processes, where the goal is to “bring simplification” to the patient chart.
* Knowledge of the basic mechanics are critical, but what’s more important in team members is having “a vision of what’s possible” and how it can be tied together to create better outcomes.

Q&A with Robert Eardley, Part 3 [Click to view Part 1 and Part 2]
Gamble:  Let’s talk a little more about the e-ICU initiative. Is that already in the works?
Eardley:  That’s in the works. Some of our remote hospitals have ICUs physically; they have patients on telemetry monitoring. They have local nursing and local staff there to take care of their needs, but they might not always be staffed at a level where they would have a physician monitoring their care all the time. And so now, we’d be able to run monitoring from another location of an ICU that sits geographically disparate by 50 or 60 miles.
That is something that has occurred since the Covid pandemic. In the past, if you ran an ICU, you needed a physician on staff. We were preparing so that if there wasn’t the time or desire to drive 30 miles in some of our outlying areas, we could set up an ICU in a remote location and we’d still have the expertise of a physician intensivist overseeing the care. Before, we wouldn’t have been able to set up an ICU structure if it wasn’t staffed 24/...