Health Business Blog

In this podcast interview, Christus Health’s SVP/CIO George Conklin describes how his 44-hospital system leverages IT to support its business. The overall organization has a three-part strategy:

1. Revamp acute care to lower costs and boost quality
2. Shift toward non-acute settings including mall-based retail clinics
3. Expand internationally, starting with Northern Mexico

The IT group seeks to provide just the right information at the time and place it’s needed, across the continuum of care. A health information exchange (HIE) architecture is rolling out, and will include  clinical decision support and data aggregation capabilities along with the ability to present information.

Christus has a head start in generating useful information from large data sets, thanks to a “massive” data and protocol standardization effort it undertook about five years ago. As a result of the effort, the organization can extract normalized data from its systems relatively painlessly. This capability has made Christus an attractive development partner for Humedica, a clinical informatics company I profiled late last year.

Christus has worked with Humedica on the development of large-scale databases and analytical frameworks that enable Christus to make better clinical decisions.

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 David Williams interviews George Conklin: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download