Federal CIO Tony Scott speaks at the 2016 CHIME Fall CIO Forum in Phoenix.
As health systems and payers scramble to deal with modern realities like ransomware and large-scale hacks, the nation’s de facto CIO-in-chief wants the healthcare and technology industries to start viewing cybersecurity through the lens of quality improvement.
“Every time we have a breach, we should think of it as a quality issue,” Tony Scott, CIO of the federal government, said during a keynote presentation at the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) Fall CIO Summit in Phoenix.
Scott is a former CTO of information systems and services at General Motors — as well as ex-CIO of VMware, Microsoft and the Walt Disney Co. He noted that there was a time, particularly in the 1980s, when U.S. automakers lagged foreign competitors on quality, but a concerted effort to fix the problem — think ISO standards and Lean process improvement — resulted in a big comeback for Detroit on that front.
There is no reason why healthcare and IT cannot replicate that success, Scott suggested. “American manufacturing quality in a few short years went way high across the board,” he said. “The same work is going on in healthcare right now.”
It’s not going on everywhere, of course. Getting to that point will take some real changes in thinking, Scott said, including understanding that digitization is not the same as automation.
Automation over the last several decades just sped up the same workflows. Digitization offers a “chance to reinvent how things get done,” Scott said. It has taken place in media, banking, transportation, government and many other industries, and healthcare is just getting around to it with the recent switch from paper to electronic health records.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“Our organization charts are really the challenge. Those are the things that are getting in the way of us realizing our full potential,” Scott said. Real change only happens when companies and organization view the world from the customer’s point of view, he explained.
Think about what the customer needs and how the customer wants to get information, then build technology around that, Scott advised. “That’s real digitization.”
CHIME is an organization mostly made up of healthcare CIOs, and Scott said that CIOs need to be the ones leading change management in organizational and employee culture in healthcare.
Highlighting the link between quality and cybersecurity, Scott talked about the Foundation for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award‘s work in this area. Notably, the Baldrige Foundation has teamed with the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop a framework for achieving excellence in cybersecurity.
NIST released a draft self-assessment tool in September and is currently taking public comments.
“It will start to change the dialogue much like the quality movement did in manufacturing in the ’80s … and move into the cybersecurity space,” Scott said of the Baldrige framework.
Photo: Neil Versel/MedCity News
