“I practiced as a hospitalist for many years. You go from room to room and bedside to bedside and you're able to care for one patient at a time...Through technology, I know the work we do impacts the care we have for all 500, 000 patients who come through the doors here at Monument Health,” said Dr. Patrick Woodard, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Monument Health.
Monument Health operates the busiest ER in South Dakota, serving a remote area where the nearest comparable trauma center is over 300 miles away. During a conversation on The CereCore Podcast, Dr. Woodard discussed how his background as a practicing internist ignited his passion for healthcare technology and health policy. Healthcare technology like policy can impact thousands of patients, which heightens the importance of reliability, invisibility and quality IT support.
Listen to the full podcast episode for a physician’s journey into the world of healthcare IT leadership, navigating AI through the lens of physician advocacy and adoption, strategies to scale quality IT support, and practical leadership advice for healthcare IT professionals.
Here are a few highlights and takeaways from Dr. Patrick Woodard.
Editor’s note: Excerpts have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Phil Sobol: Did you always want to be a doctor? How did you get into technology?
Dr. Patrick Woodard: I trained in internal medicine at Howard University, and there was a bad outcome. I realized that using some technology, rather than the paper we were using, probably could solve that problem.
I dusted off coding skills and some of my old nerdiness from my youth and wrote an application that would prevent that type of bad outcome from happening again. I went to the hospital chief medical officer and said, ‘Hey, I think this would solve the problem and prevent it from happening again.’
He immediately saw the utility in it, and asked me, ‘Well, how much are you charging us?’ I hadn't actually thought that far ahead. So I made up a number. I think I low balled myself, but I turned that into a company and that's how I got into technology.
I've been really lucky to be able to turn that into a career on the health system side of things. The impact I saw in health policy, which was the ability to extend your reach beyond just the person in front of you, is what I see in technology as well as an internist.
Phil Sobol: You've experienced all phases of technology, from ideation, implementation, adoption, to ongoing improvement. What are barometers for success and satisfaction for new technologies, for the providers, but then also for the remainder of the organization?
Dr. Patrick Woodard: Adoption to me is a proxy for everything. Now the tool could also not work, right? People could be adopting or maybe they're adopting things we don't necessarily want them to have. Tools that help them solve a problem that we don't necessarily know about, and so they go out on their own and find something. That happens occasionally.
I think it's a good opportunity for us to step back and say, ‘Hey, well, what is the problem they're trying to solve, and is there something that we either already have in place that they don't know about or that we can expand the use of?’
There are always opportunities to chat with your docs, hear what people are doing. I've spent a lot of time talking about physicians, but they're not our only caregivers here.
I was chatting with a really innovative AI company the other day, but their product asks clinicians to document both in their tool and in EHR. And I don't want to do that to my teams, right? To our caregivers. Why would I ask you to do double work?
Phil Sobol: No technology is perfect. IT issues are going to happen. As a physician, what are those key ingredients for really good healthcare IT support? Then, pretend you're not a physician and only a CIO. Would that key ingredient be the same? Or is there something more?
Dr. Patrick Woodard: When you walk into a room and you flip a light switch and the lights turn on you don't think anything actually. It's just it the lights came on. Only when it doesn't turn on, then you have to start going into kind of your troubleshooting mode.
Well, is this, did this light burn out? Is it only this light that's not turning on? Well, did I fail to notice that there are no other lights on in the entire building? Is it just the kitchen that's not turning on? And so I have to go downstairs and find the breaker and flip that or what have you.
It's the same in the technology that we put in front of our caregivers as well when it works. You shouldn't notice and I hope that almost everything that we do, or that we put in place just works and you just kind of don't notice it. The computer logs in quickly. The EHR loads, you find your patient, you get your desk, your work done and you go home.
So from that perspective, that's the goal, right? That's the kind of invisibility of the technology that we put in place is really all about support, supporting the relationship between a caregiver and a patient and ensuring that we're able to render high quality care in a way that's compassionate and human oriented.
When things deviate from that kind of it just works philosophy is when there's the friction that makes people either irritated or frustrated or leads to burnout or leads to dissatisfaction with the working environment or the tools in front of them. And I think that's what we're needing to constantly fight against.
Phil Sobol: Today we support your providers if they have an IT issue, and we work closely with your other application teams. From your perspective, what are some of the benefits of working with a partner organization for clinical IT support?
Dr. Patrick Woodard: It goes down to it just working, right? The light switch. The light comes on when you flip the switch. We're a small, medium sized health system in a geographically challenged area. We're fairly remote. We're the busiest ER in western South Dakota.
In fact, I think we're the busiest ER in all of South Dakota and the next trauma center of any size is more than 300 miles away. Which means if you're going to get care here, it's us or nobody. It is really important. That means we have to do it right all the time. Our light switch needs to come on all the time too.
But we also have a fairly small population compared to New York or LA or even Denver. When you are trying to balance the right approach to resourcing your own internal teams and functions that you need to deliver, there's a balance between how do we do it in a way that is successful and functional, and how do we do it in a way that recognizes staffing limitations or what have you. And so for us, it's about the ability to extend limited resources in the most fiscally responsible and staffing model agnostic way that allows us to be successful 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year that maybe we wouldn't be able to do with a fairly small clinical help desk.
So, from that perspective, if we are thinking about it from the approach of the light—it has to come on every time you flip the switch.
Listen for more
Stream the full episode to hear more perspective and advice from Dr. Patrick Woodard, CIO at Monument Health.
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