Podcast Interview with CTO Chuck Christian, Part 2: “You Literally Have to Overcommunicate.”

As healthcare IT leaders grapple with the day-to-day challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, while keeping a close eye on the strategic goals established by the organization, it’s important to ask this question: “How much change can an organization consume at one time?” For Chuck Christian, who is VP of Technology at Franciscan Health, it’s become clear that some initiatives need to be put on hold — or at least, decelerated — to enable the IT staff to focus on what matters most: responding to the needs of providers. Recently, healthsystemCIO spoke with Christian about how the leadership team at Franciscan, a 12-hospital system based in Indiana, is prioritizing to ensure patient care is front and center, while also keeping the trains running. He also talks about his core objectives as VP of Technology, what it takes to lead during a crisis, and the lasting effect COVID-19 will have on the industry. Part 1 Part 2 * Phishing campaigns – “We have to be on guard.” * Managing updates through VPN connections * Leadership during a crisis – “You have to literally over-communicate.” * Installing VoIP throughout the enterprise * Telecommuting & virtual visits – “I don’t think it’s going to change.” * Transitioning to Franciscan * “I’ve got an awesome team.” * Indiana’s network of health IT leaders LISTEN HERE USING THE PLAYER BELOW OR SUBSCRIBE THROUGH YOUR FAVORITE PODCASTING SERVICE.  Bold Statements We’ve shared with everybody to be cautious — overly cautious — about what you click. If you don’t know the source and don’t understand it, don’t click on it. I’m always having meetings with my teams. We meet with site directors and our business relationship managers for each one of those facilities and other key business units of the organization to try to understand what their needs are and how we can meet them. I don’t think we’re ever going to get back to where we were, because we’ve learned some things about how we can provide care to patients and how we can work. The only thing I don’t get to do is to see people’s faces. I don’t get to interact with them, and that’s tough. We’re built as humans to interact with individuals, and to have the collegiality that goes along with it. It was never, ‘We can’t do that.’ It was, ‘how do we figure out how to do it?’ We spent a lot of late nights finding solutions for virtual visits and virtual rounding in the nursing homes. Some of our physician leaders are in nursing homes, and we needed to figure out, how can they round without physically being there? How can we find a solution? Gamble:  The timing of all this is pretty incredible, because we had the final rule released about a month ago, which has all kinds of implications for virtual care. Christian:  It does, and the fact is, at the same time they were rolling those out, OCR was relaxing requirements around patient privacy, and HIPAA was starting to release some information where appropriate so we could take care of the public health issue as well. We still have to be on our guard and cautious. The other thing we’ve had to do is ramp up security because there have been so many different phishing campaigns that have come at everybody. They’ll take advantage of any crisis to make you think you’re clicking on a link that’s going to give you some salient information, when really it’s loading malware onto your PC.