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  Today in Health it, this story is the latest Gartner CIO report and it has some really interesting findings. Looking forward to talking about that. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current.

And engaged. I just wanna ask you real quick, have you signed up for clip notes? CliffNotes is a service we offer at this week in Health It to keep you and your staff current. We know you may not have time to listen to every episode every day, but we developed clip notes to keep you informed. It's an email that goes out 24 hours after each show airs with a summary, bullet points, and two to four short video clips.

Subscribe on our website this week, health.com. Just click on the subscribe button. In the upper right hand corner of every page, or better yet, have your team subscribe and get the discussion started on the right foot. Alright, here's today's story, Gartner, CIO report. This is from Healthcare IT News, Gartner, CIO report IT spending expected to increase for cyber analytics and cloud, which just happens to be

Of CIOs. Now obviously it's from within healthcare. It's outside of healthcare, but this will give you a good idea of what's just going on in general in the technology space and sometimes looking outside the industry is good. You learn a lot of good things that way. Let me just give you a couple of excerpts.

Gartner surveyed 1,877 CIO respondents in 74 countries. Its finding reveal four ways in which CIOs can continue to make a difference in digital business acceleration and long-term agility. These are four very interesting findings. Number one, win differently by helping the enterprise anticipate increasingly digital interactions.

Customers expect. What does that mean in healthcare? I think it means, you know, you have to look at your population and understand is telehealth a big win in your community? Don't look at the broader, general idea of what's going on in all of healthcare. Look at your community. Do surveys in your community.

Do focus groups in your community understand what is going on in the communities that you serve so that you can . Develop the solutions that make the most sense. It may be telehealth, it may not be telehealth, it may be home care. It may not be home care. You have to really look at what is going on in your specific community.

I know that the community I live in today is very different than the community I moved from in Southern California. Alright, number two. So number one, just win differently. Number two, unleash. . Force multipliers, refocus it, leadership around digital business acceleration and remodel the enterprise's core technology.

I think this is a big one as well. One of the things in healthcare is we've gotten by without giving a real significant return on investment for technology, and I think those days are gone. I think we're gonna be held accountable for really delivering . Uh, additional business value, additional clinical value and additional experience value if there is a, a value that we can measure around experience.

So we're gonna be held accountable to those things, and not only delivering dollar for dollar, but multipliers really being able to help the business to do things that we couldn't do before and scale it in a way that enables us to drive more dollars. More services, more reach, those kinds of things.

Number three, banish drags and work to increase efficiency while giving supply chains more resilience, giving supply chains more. Resilience is a top priority in healthcare. There's no doubt about that. Banish drags, I think is interesting. We're seeing a lot of uptake in terms of automation. We're seeing a lot of things happening.

With regard to robotic process automation, and I think that drive to efficiency is only gonna continue. I've seen a report that shows that the revenue that we lost last year has not come back. We essentially just went back to the same revenue line that we would normally have experienced. So the two full months of no elective procedure, revenue doesn't appear to be coming back ever.

It's, it's lost, it's, it's in the ether. So that's gonna have to be made up somewhere. And again, I believe this is an opportunity for us in health it, they're going to be looking to us to say, how can we do this with technology? We've seen it in other industries. We experience it in other industries and travel and other things.

And we'd like to apply some of those things to healthcare. Number four, redirect resources. Pushing investment towards new business priorities. And I think this is also gonna be happening within healthcare. I think as new entrants come in, we're gonna be forced to adjust and adapt to those new entrants as they come into our markets.

And we are going to have to support new business models, asset light type models going into new markets and those kind of things. All right. Let's take a look at some of the other quotes from here. Nearly two thirds of the top performers said Funding for digital innovation has increased as a result of the pandemic.

And I believe that's true and going to continue. Organizations that have increased their funding of digital innovation are 2.7 times more likely to be a top performer than a trailing performer. Not sure how they measure that, but that doesn't surprise me. I think if you look at the banks, I, I remember the conversation where Jamie Diamond was sharing the amount of money they have put towards digital innovation.

I. And it's significant. We talk about what percentage of revenue or what percentage of operating, uh, profit are we spending on it and it investments. And I think if I looked at some of the banks, it was three times the amount, not 3% more, three times the amount that we're spending in healthcare. So just something to keep in mind.

And obviously top performers will come from that as long as the investments make sense. So-called trailing performers in the survey were those who had rated themselves poorly on digital maturity and relative business performance. CIOs also reported boosts in cybersecurity investments. Perhaps no surprise given them ramped up ransomware attacks around the world.

And again, I will say now is the time to get additional money for your cybersecurity plans. But don't just start spreading money all over the place. Bring somebody in who really understands how to put together a good program on how to knit all these things together. Don't just plug a couple of holes and think you've got it covered.

Don't buy a whole bunch of tools and think you have it covered. Look at a comprehensive program, and if you don't know how to do that, just go find somebody who can help you there. There's a lot of people we've interviewed on the show who can help you to do those kinds of things. About 60% of the respondents are increasing investment in cyber and information security.

Followed closely by business intelligence and data analytics and cloud services and solutions. So there you go. Those are the top three investments CIOs were able to refocus IT leadership around digital business acceleration and remodel the enterprise's core technology. At one point or another, every CIO got a chance to shine during COVID-19.

He continued. This is Roswell Jones again, the larger trend when it comes to healthcare leadership specifically CIOs have spoken about the importance of a sound digital foundation. When the pandemic hit, we were able to scale up our existing offerings to respond to the demand for digital care, rather than some forced pivot or buy some standalone third party solutions.

Dr. Paul Testa, chief Medical Information Officer at NYU Langone Health told healthcare IT news. And I think they would be in in the upper percentile of performers. But to be honest with you, I'm not sure it's because we anticipated things. I think it's because, quite frankly, cloud infrastructure became ubiquitous.

We could gain access to these things. We could scale up very rapidly. Not because we anticipated it, but because Microsoft did. Amazon did because Zoom did because Epic even did. And others, our enterprise software partners anticipated the need to scale. And have built software that could scale and that really helped to get us through the pandemic.

Some health systems had some interesting solutions, but for the most part, we relied on our third party partners and they did a phenomenal job. And we need to continue to look at partners that are thinking long term, that have these kinds of architecture that we can scale up and scale down as needed.

Alright, that's, that's about all from this article. I thought it was a very interesting article. So what's the so what on this? You know, it's interesting. I, I would, uh, focus in on those four things in the middle, win differently. Unleash force multipliers, banish the drags, and shore up your supply chain, as well as redirect resources.

Towards new business priorities. Those four things seem to be the, the core of what they're trying to communicate here. But in addition to that, make sure you shore up your cybersecurity spend, as we talked about earlier. And the other thing is, when I read these guys' reports, it reminds me to stop looking backwards and to keep looking forward.

As a CIO. So one of the things that we could easily fall into a trap here in healthcare is to keep looking back at COVID-19 and say, look what we've done and look what we're ramping up. And we obviously have to do things to prepare for the next pandemic. But, but for the most part, if we got through this one, we did an awful lot of that work over the last year and a half, and it's time to turn our focus forward.

What does it look like coming out of here? How do we accelerate coming outta here? How do we become a stronger organization that meets the needs of the people in our community? Alright, that's all for today. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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