Building peripheral apps around our electronic medical records that enable clinicians to collect information in an easier way than getting it out of an EMR is very important to us too.
We have built apps in Microsoft Teams that allow our physicians to query our EMRs. A physician can be in Teams and be on a conference call with other physicians about a patient. They can be looking at images and be speaking or chatting with each other while at the same time, they can be verbally querying data out of the EMR as they’re having that consultation with one another. That’s just one example of how we’re making EMRs work better for them.
HEALTHTECH: What is your personal leadership philosophy, and how do you see it fitting into the overall mission of Northwell?
I think it’s to create and sustain a high-functioning, high-performing IT workforce that’s engaged and motivated. We have two customers in IT: We have patients, and we have clinicians, and we have to serve both of them.
On the physician and clinician side, it’s about how we provide them with the best tools and the best information that we can so that they can take the best care of patients.
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On the patient side, it’s about how we acquire them, retain them and interact with them in a way that provides convenient access to care and convenient access to information that they require about their care. All the components that you have to slug through as a patient — finding a doctor, finding the right care, making an appointment, checking in and out, viewing your information afterward — we want to make that as convenient and easy as possible.
A lot of that is done through digital apps, which is another one of our major investments — a digital patient experience that provides exactly what I just said.