Geisinger CIO John Kravitz on His Tenure as CHIME Chairman: A Time For an Intense Policy Focus

Jan. 16, 2020
John Kravitz, CIO of the Geisinger Health System, shares exclusively with Healthcare Innovation his perspectives as this year’s current Chairman of CHIME

John Kravitz has been CIO at the Danville, Pennsylvania-based Geisinger Health System since January 2016; prior to assuming that role, he had spent six years at the organization, first, as associate vice-president for external relations, working with CIOs and CEOs in partner organizations, and then as vice president and associate CIO responsible for mergers and acquisitions.

This month, Kravitz became chairman of the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based CHIME (College of Healthcare Information Management Executives), the nation’s chief association for healthcare CIOs. In that volunteer leadership position, Kravitz is spending this full year collaborating with CHIME’s senior staff to evolve forward the association’s overall vision and strategy.

Kravitz spoke recently with Healthcare Innovation Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland regarding his perspectives on CHIME’s current moment, and the landscape around healthcare CIO leadership nationwide. Below are excerpts from their interview.

Congratulations on your chairmanship this year at CHIME. How has your volunteer engagement in the association evolved forward over time?

I’ve been a member of CHIME since 1999. I’ve always liked CHIME, have always engaged with them. Went through the CIO Boot Camp, went through CHCIO certification. All that has been very usseful. I’ve already served two years on the board and am Chairman for a year. And then I’ll be chairman of the CHIME Foundation, next year.

What would you like to accomplish as Chairman?

A lot of it will be focused on education and advocacy efforts, as in the past. Let me start there. Advocacy has been a very big component of CHIME’s overall activities. The federal government—HHS, CMS, OIG [the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the HHS Office of the Inspector General], a number of different federal agencies, have been looking for healthcare CIO input. And so I’ll continue to be very active in the Policy Steering Committee. Our policy work has been very intense in the last several years. We’ll continue to

What are CHIME’s current top policy priorities at the federal level?

A lot of the focus has been on population health management, and wellness. So one of the strong initiatives coming out of this and gaining a lot of support, is around telemedicine services, especially in rural areas. So CHIME has been advocating on behalf of its members to support telemedicine, specifically regulatory change and reimbursement, specifically. That’s been one of the big initiatives going forward, per the members of CHIME.

CMS seems to show two faces to the industry. Seema Verma constantly talks about empowering consumers and stimulating the free market to create change, but CMS under this administration has been intensely directive, as with CMS’s push to get providers into two-sided risk as quickly as possible. What are your perspectives on that?

One of the things you mentioned about transparency—part of that is interoperability and the ability to exchange data. I’ve got to look into this further. Health plan data-sharing is going to be coming in 2020, earlier than for hospitals. And that, I think, will be important as far as transparency. The other thing the federal government will be pushing is price transparency and driving down the prices of prescription drugs. Big pharma has been gouging providers and consumers. There’s just a lot of concern there. It appears they’re working both sides of the street; they want to use the free market and their regulatory power at the same time. We’ll have to continue to work with the Administration. And they often come to CHIME to solicit input from us. CHIME will continue to act as a sounding board for these agencies, and will make sure to be utilitarian in our approach.

What do healthcare CIOs need to focus on, per the current landscape of policy and reimbursement?

We can focus on the interoperability piece. All the technology pieces that CIOs can impact are areas where they can move the business forward. As I mentioned, one example is telemedicine and bringing technology into the home. Another could be moving data centers to the cloud. I’m actually evaluating that myself, to determine how efficacious that choice might be. So those are the things that we’re focused on.

And for CIOs, I’m really focused as Chairman on education. Let’s look at what our options are, in areas like cloud, in areas like digital strategy. How do you go about developing a digital strategy? A couple of examples of things I’m looking at: I’m looking at patient identification via facial recognition, so that when a patient comes into our organization, we already know everything about that patient, and can provide the best level of customer support and service we can, in order to treat them effectively. I talk regularly about the “CIO 3.0” and what kinds of skills and preparation that individual needs.

What does the CIO 3.0 look like?

The CIO 3.0 is a partner to the leadership of the organization; it’s a person who understands how to leverage technology to gain business or a new foothold in the market, who can understand how technology can improve clinical workflow, support mobile apps, support technology integration, etc. Look at the way that corporations like Amazon can integrate functions. So it’s providing a way to be transparent, a way to collect data and manage data, making it easy for your customer; doing the work in IT to make those processes seamless and transparent to the eventual customer.

Where are some CIOs potentially stumbling, in that context?

Let me say it this way: a number of CIO colleagues I know are somewhere along that journey. I think they’re working to get to that CIO 3.0 level. This came from meetings that took place in a major city, with about 20 HC CEOs, who met with Russ Branzell, the president and CEO of CHIME; and they were talking with him about how CHIME can help them prepare for the future. They didn’t feel they were ready for the future, they were keeping the lights on and doing implementations. They weren’t really thinking outside the box in terms of looking at ways to leverage the business forward. I don’t think any of those CEOs felt that their CIOs were ready. This meeting happened in the early fall. He shared that with me, and we saw this as a gaping hole and a big concern. They wanted their CIOs to be prepared. So CHIME took that on as a challenge.

So, this year, we will be looking to expand and provide further education and also providing additional presentations at the spring event and the Fall Forum, where CIOs who have moved ahead, can share their findings with colleagues. And setting up education to provide a road map for people, to help take them to the next level; that’s what they’re lacking right now.

It seems that it will be a steeper road to climb for healthcare IT leaders going forward, yes?

Let’s say you’re a CIO in a smaller hospital that doesn’t do much with population health. What’s your priority, establishing a pop health program, or a digital strategy, or a move to the cloud? The delta is getting bigger. Think of the banking system going back about 20 years ago. With money access machines, they had to establish a way to interoperate together. Healthcare is going through a similar change now. What makes HC more difficult is the complexity of the patient’s life hanging in the balance. You couldn’t just be sued because you messed up someone’s money, you could be sued because you killed somebody.

But if you think about it, it comes down to this: what are your organization’s priorities? They can’t be everything, because if you try to be everything, you’ll be nothing. The CIO will be out of a job and the CEO will ultimately be out of a job, too, then. So yes, is it a difficult time? It’s probably the most difficult time for any CIO to be in a role. A lot of CIOs’ heads are spinning with all the challenges. At one point in time, meaningful use made everyone’s heads spin; you had to make sure that that was correct. Well, right now, there are a lot of complicating factors coming up. It’s going to come down to leadership in your HC organization, and determining where your priorities lie. Is it going to be about creating a population health management program that delivers the patient to the right level of care?

With regard to your role as Chairman of CHIME—what do you hope will happen in the next year?

It’s an exciting time for CHIME as a whole. It’s a time where we’re really going to be forging into the future. There’s a heavy lift for CHIME in helping to move CIOs to this CIO 3.0. We have concepts, we have people who have done bits and pieces of this. We want to put together programs that will help our colleagues be successful in their roles. Healthcare CIOs want to take that next step. I think it’s an exciting time; it’s a challenging, stress-filled time as well. But we can come out of this in a much better state in U.S. healthcare overall.

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