LAS VEGAS – “We feel like every person within our organization has the ability to touch patients’ lives in one way or another,” said Franco Cardillo, executive director of digital strategy and operations at Medical University of South Carolina at HIMSS25 here on Wednesday. “How can we bring everybody along with us on this journey?”

Communication and understanding among all stakeholders, on the clinical and technology operations side, are key to working together for a more optimized care delivery process and a better patient experience, he said.

As the health system pursues IT and innovation projects, “we want these groups to know that while we operate outside of Epic, we do have a host of tools and services that can support the patient journey,” said Cardillo.

“We can offload things on our care team members – clinicians, nurses – but we’re like an iceberg. Everything along the top is the patient experience, and everything below the fold is all the different products that we’re all looking to implement.

“If those products don’t talk to each other or I’ve got a product manager in one area of IS, and we’re in digital transformation, are we talking?” he added. “Are we wasting calories daily if my product can do the same thing that your product can do? We want to have those conversations internally. We want to [improve] operations, not for us but for the patients.”

Crystal Broj, health system chief digital transformation officer at MUSC, says the Charleston, S.C.-based provider is focused on three key areas of change management.

Managing IT resources

That includes reconciling the different project management approaches that may be brought to bear.

“How many of you have tried to implement something into an EHR?” she asked rhetorically. “Was that easy? Everybody in the room’s EHR is a little bit different, which makes it hard for vendors to be able to connect in correctly.”

Plus, she added, “our IT folks are used to a very waterfall lifestyle: They have their EHR, and June 30th, they’re going to go live with the next version. So they know 30 days before that, they have to be done testing. Thirty days before that, they have to read the notes. Thirty days before that, they have to get ready. They know exactly who and how many people are going to touch that migration when it happens.”

But when you talk about digital tools, “most of our vendor friends are Agile. And you’re trying to connect to the EHR,” Broj said. “So you don’t need a cadence person for 40 days and an API person for 40 days. Usually, you need an API guy Friday morning one week, and then maybe a little bit the next week to fix something or change something, or you need somebody to write a report so it can be adjusted.”

That can be quite hard for IT to manage “because they don’t know when or how you’re going to be using those resources,” she said. “So what we did for staffing, we really tried to work with our CIO and our EPMO areas to find flexible solutions and allow them to dedicate time for transformation.”

One of the key things with that is letting them know right away when you’re going to do it, and working with your vendors, because the vendors actually do know that you need API or you need whatever. It can give you how many hours they’ve seen in other places. So that really helps that conversation.

But the big thing is bringing them in as soon as you think about a transformation so they can get on board, she said.

And Broj added: “I found it very helpful to tell them why. A lot of times, IT doesn’t get that. We have kickoff meetings, and we include our IT folks so that they can hear from the business users about why: ”We’re going to get this ROI. It’s going to make this better for the patient.’ So they understand and are part of having pride for making that project happen.”

Process improvement

“When you iterate multiple releases on a product, usually you’re not going to go, ‘I’m going to start this product, and I’m going to put it across the entire organization right away,'” said Broj. “Usually you start a little bit. You might put in one feature, and then you’re going to do another feature, and then you’re going to do another feature.

“And we have to remember that vendors are always iterating their products too,” she added. “The people you’re giving the tool to have to know that it’s going to be good enough for now and then we’re going to continue to improve it.

“You have to improve your communication, which is why you need change management, and then follow up with folks with surveys and so on to make sure that they still understand.”

Workflow efficiencies

“When you implement a new software, you probably shouldn’t put it on the old processes,” said Broj. “Digital transformation is people, process and technology. We can bring tech to the table, but if it doesn’t integrate into a workflow, if you can’t change the workflow to include it, if you make them jump through and put in three logins before they can get to the tool they want them to use, that doesn’t help. We solicit feedback from patients and staff, and we work side by side with our business partners to enhance that efficiency.”

Cardillo added one more important point.

“We need a pain point before we have a solution, not the other way around,” he said. “Putting a digital tool in place of a bad process isn’t really beneficial for anybody.”