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  Today in health, it accelerating digital transformation. 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. Just wanna make you aware of a couple ways that you can stay current. One is, we are close to a thousand subscribers on our this week in health IT YouTube channel.

Alright, let's get to today's story. Today's story comes from the HIMS conference. It's in healthcare, finance news. The story is about NYU Langone's acceleration of digital during the COVID-19 pandemic. And they talk about how technology can enhance the patient experience, but it requires organizational buy-in and infrastructure.

So those are gonna be the two keys. That's what we're gonna come back to. Let me share some of the excerpts from the story. Because of its investment in the foundational technologies, NYU Land gown and New York City was able to quickly scale its digital solutions, not only to meet clinical demand, but also to develop ways for patients to access care despite the physical restrictions inherent.

In the pandemic, Nader Rabi, NYU, Langone's, executive Vice President, vice Dean, chief Digital and Information Officer, spoke at HIMSS 21. He's also been a guest on this week in health. It. In this session titled, riding the Wave of Digital Transformation, how Technology Can Enhance the patient Experience. He goes on to say, in the past eight years, we've been focused on building the fundamental platform of digital infrastructure from EHRs to connecting in the cloud in the right way to AI and machine learning.

All these fundamental building blocks you need said mbi. You need to build your digital experience. On top of that, a sound digital strategy, he said is about synergy from the operations team. To the technologists and even marketing, all constituents need to work together toward a common goal. And he goes on to talk about the patient digital experience and what they're doing around that.

Lemme tell you some of the things they were able to do during the pandemic. The academic medical center's, digital efforts have been consistent. And Progressive throughout the pandemic In particular, it created an AI risk scoring system for covid to 19 patients. Created a comprehensive coronavirus dashboard for clinicians and executives supported a peak of more than 7,000 virtual patient visits in one day.

Before that, it was sparse, but all of a sudden it shifted. The experience for clinicians is just as robust as it is for our patients. So that's all from that story. As you know, I like to end all of these stories with a So what? Why is it important? Why should we be talking about it? I'm gonna go back to what they said earlier in the article, which is a lot of projects are operational projects.

They're not technology projects. They are operational projects. They're clinical projects, they're patient engagement projects that have a technology component. And when we approach them that way, we organize differently. We think differently, and we create better solutions because they originate from those people that are going to use technology.

I know this has been said a lot, but I think it's an important point that they make in this story that they were a demand generated it, organization it in. Throw technologies at the wall and say, Hey, look at all the things we had. They had demands coming to them, and they were able to respond and respond rapidly.

Now, why were they able to respond is the next thing. And the reason they were able to respond is because they had an architecture in mind that they were developing towards. They were eliminating tech debt. They were adopting internet architectures. And they were looking at technology specifically that would allow them to be agile.

This is an intentional design principle and it's important to start there. I. Once you start there, you start to look at your technology investments differently. You start to look at the technology selection process differently, and agility starts to get ranked higher as it should, because as we learn through the pandemic, we don't know what's coming next.

We don't know what the next thing that is going to be required for healthcare. So when it sees itself as a responsive unit to the demands of the organization, of the community. Of the clinical staff, we are able to understand that we need to be responsive, to be able to be adaptive, and to be able to move rapidly to create new solutions.

That's why I like this story. That's why I like what NYU Langone did, and that's why I think it's important to have an intentional purpose to build out architecture that's gonna give you that agility as a health system. That's all for today. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note.

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