The CIO of a major health nonprofit explains how its digital transformation helped prepare it for the coronavirus pandemic
- Crises like the coronavirus pandemic that are causing economic uncertainty and widespread panic can be a major roadblock for tech transformations.
- But at Providence St. Joseph Health, the outbreak is not just proving why the ongoing IT overhaul is necessary - it's accelerating the pace of innovation.
- "If we hadn't made the progress we made over the last 12 months on this digital transformation, we would be in severe jeopardy right now," chief information officer B.J. Moore told Business Insider.
- Follow all of Business Insider's latest updates on the coronavirus here.
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Times of crisis like the ongoing coronavirus pandemic can be a major roadblock for investments that companies make on digital transformations.
But at Providence St. Joseph Health, a nonprofit healthcare system that operates in six states, the epidemic is proving why those efforts are so critical. And it's even helping to accelerate the ongoing tech overhaul.
"If we hadn't made the progress we made over the last 12 months on this digital transformation, we would be in severe jeopardy right now," chief information officer B.J. Moore told Business Insider. "We've had a couple hundred other pet projects that people insist we continue work on. It's given us the room to shut those down."
When Moore came onboard from Microsoft, he embarked on a "back to basics" mission that focused on seven core areas, including a pivot to the cloud from physical data centers and consolidating its electronic health records to one provider.
Those initiatives remain ongoing during the coronavirus crisis and employees working on them continue to travel to Providence's 51 hospitals. This is despite other projects falling off and the spread of the disease forcing other firms to prohibit non-essential travel.
Like other tech leaders, Moore warned that halting projects could actually be more detrimental in the long term. Instead, he advised others CIOs to use the situation as a way to realign to the overall goals of the transformation.
"Use this as an opportunity to create focus on those vital few [projects]," he said. "Use this as an opportunity to shut down the 500 other non-critical activities we are asked to do."
'We're accelerating'
The coronavirus outbreak has also given Moore the result he needed to justify to leadership the investments made so far and the need for those to continue.
Several of the milestones his team already hit are proving critical in helping the company respond to the pandemic.
The adoption of Microsoft Teams, the software giant's workplace chat platform, and other Office 365 productivity tools (along with improvements to the network infrastructure) made it possible for more employees to work remotely.
The hospital chain also created an online chatbot that is helping to field many initial questions from potential patients, which is reducing traffic to the hospitals and allowing those with the most urgent cases to get faster access to care.
The situation is even quickening the pace of the transformation.
"Things that we were going to spread out over the next two to three months, we're accelerating to the next four to six weeks," Moore said.
The chatbot, for example, had been in the works for six months. Once the coronavirus started to emerge, it went into production within a week.
But like any good CIO, Moore said he wished further progress was made on some initiatives.
Ninety percent of the workforce is currently using the Microsoft productivity tools, and Moore is aiming for 100%. The company is also still relying on three different electronic medical record vendors - Epic, Allscripts, and Meditech - and is trying to get that down to one.
And Moore is already thinking what tools would be helpful in future crises.
Beefier patient datasets, he said, could help Providence better understand the health of the communities they serve and who might be at risk. And tech-enabled monitoring devices in homes could pinpoint individuals with fevers - perhaps even before the subjects are aware.
As the coronavirus outbreak continues to reverberate through the global economy, many businesses will have to make tough investment decisions. Moore's results at Providence show why funding for tech projects are so critical, even amid times of crisis.