When a healthcare crisis hits, CIOs must act as agents for change, something the World Health Organization's new CIO learned very quickly.
During his first three months on the job, Marc Touitou had to get a grip on the West Africa Ebola outbreak and use his IT skills to help prevent its spread.
“My first 100 days was Ebola, and nothing prepares you for that. You have a new reality,” Touitou said during an interview with ComputerWeekly.
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Here are a few of the lessons Touitou learned that he says CIOs can use to respond and adapt during a healthcare emergency:
Use your technical skills to simplify a complicated situation. In Touitou's case, he realized that a wearable Bluetooth thermometer that records body temperature with a phone app could help mitigate the spread of Ebola. (Fever is an early symptom.)
Don't let politics get in the way of change. Political challenges are ubiquitous across any setting with managers and a hierarchy, not just at organizations like the United Nations or WHO. A CIO, he told the publication, must have a vision, a strategy, and the determination and drive to pull it off.
Create a centralized database: Part of reforming the role as a CIO means coordinating relevant information across data sets into one single location for optimized access. As CIO, Touitou pointed out that WHO’s data was scattered across different data warehouses. “We did not have global visibility of all of our warehouses.” Getting a full picture of different data ecosystems is essential to organizational efficiency, he said.
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Although many hospitals have disaster plans, a recent survey found that 51 percent of 1,859 doctors in the United States don't think their organizations are prepared to handle mass emergencies. But it’s impossible to be 100 percent prepared for everything, especially as readiness must change as the industry manages potential emerging threats, such as Ebola and the Zika virus, as FierceHealthcare has reported.
Mayo Clinic's hospitals train staff for potential emergencies that are common to their regions, such as hurricanes in Florida. But the organizations have guidelines in place for any range of potential problems, says David Marcelletti, vice chair of supply chain operations.
“Healthcare facilities face a never-ending challenge in preparing for disasters or pandemics and can never be too prepared,” Marcelletti says.
The greatest challenge, he says, is trying to prepare for the disasters that can snowball from a large event.