Health Tech

The Areas That Intermountain Health’s CIO Wants To Address With Technology (And the One He Doesn’t)

In an interview at the Vive conference in Nashville, Tennessee, Craig Richardville, Intermountain’s chief digital and information officer outlined the three areas of priority for Intermountain Health for which technology can be leveraged. But when it comes to a major headache for CIOs, Richardville seems to suggest that a government-led all-hands-on-deck approach is what is needed.

By Arundhati Parmar on March 28, 2023

Man fingers setting priority button on highest position. Concept image for illustration of priorities management.

Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Health is a nonprofit health, integrated healthcare system with clinics, a medical group, affiliate networks, hospitals, homecare, telehealth, health insurance plans, and other services, along with wholly owned subsidiaries including SelectHealth, Saltzer Health, Castell, Tellica, and Classic Air Medical. It employs a team of 60,000.

I caught up with Intermountain Health’s chief digital and information officer —Craig Richardville — on the third day of the ViVE digital health conference in Nashville, which is hosted by HLTH and Chime. The following is a slightly-edited version of our conversation.

MedCity News: Given that there’s so much financial strain that hospitals are reporting every single day, what are your top three pain points that can be solved with technology?

Richardville: Well, I don’t know if they can be solved, but technology can certainly improve. So the first one is on the labor side, what I would call the investment in the building of the digital workforce. This would be a big component of how to help the financials and have a relief upon the hiring and the payments to people who travel to work at the health system. And so these would be robotic process automation in the back end, what we are doing with our supply chain and in terms of revenue cycle. So we’re trying to automate some of those tasks. 

When you look at the nursing side — and the whole aspect of the virtual nursing component — utilizing artificial intelligence is probably a step in the right direction. You just have a virtual nurse without having to physically be there — kind of similar to the telemedicine, but also in terms of using artificial intelligence or what I call advance intelligence. So you leverage AI to truly, interpret the conversations, place orders, document, the medical notes from the nurse — putting that into play. We’ve done some of that already on the physician side primarily in the clinic space. But we need the whole digital workforce component to help us be a forever organization, and within the industry, that’s certainly a necessity.

The second part is the experience.  The joy of practicing medicine, the joy of practicing nursing, the joy of being a pharmacist, the joy of being dietary service and nutritional services person. So there’s a big piece of what we want to do to keep our caregivers —  we call all of our associates or employees, caregivers — happy and pleased to come into work, to work virtually.

And the last one has to do with the patient, consumer experience. Whether it’s retail or buying something or whether it’s looking at banking or financial services, in many cases we can do that 24/7. And when we look at healthcare, we haven’t evolved. Certainly we have to have some guardrails and some things to build around apps to make sure they’re safe and secure, they’re reliable, that proper security surrounds them so that you can do a lot of your self diagnosis. Maybe there can be nudges if you’re on a chronic disease management program that can remind you to do things. If we have wearables on, say if you have some kind of a abnormal rhythm in your heart or your blood pressure or something in your pulse, or a combination of certain things may automatically trigger an intervention to occur without you having to think about.

MedCity News: So if I were to distill all of that, the first piece seems to be technology for operational efficiency. Second seems to be reducing clinician burnout. Third seems to be patient experience.

Richardville: That’s absolutely perfect.

MedCity News. Okay, you said three things and those three things did not include cybersecurity. So where does this fall?

Richardville: Cyber — it’s not even a healthcare risk. It’s really across all industries. So, to me there’s a very large national concern. We need to advocate for continued legislation to help us. To help manage and monitor and be able to have some shared services across not only healthcare but across all industries. When you look at it from a logical perspective — like I don’t have to put up walls to protect me from an attack, some kind of a bomb flying over, or a missile or nuclear attack.
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MedCity News: So you think cybersecurity requires an industry-wide effort or is it something that government needs to lead?
Richardville: I think it needs to be one way to look at it. I think it needs to be that the government needs to help mandate that there is a requirement for a collaboration across all industries. 

Photo: olm26250, Getty Images