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For Sophy Lu, Northwell Health’s chief information officer, it is the year of action. She has seen transformational moments before, like the burgeoning era of health information technology and world of electronic medical records. Just as Lu’s organization was beginning their own evolution, ICD-10 went into effect and changed the landscape of medical coding in a very short period. But those were regulatory changes that could, in some ways, be planned for and accommodated.
COVID-19 was something else entirely. It was an immediate change without buffer and notice. It did not care if your health system was ready.
“After spending so much time working through regulatory issues, the pandemic made us cast everything aside to answer one question: How do we work together to ensure that we’re saving lives, getting supplies, and do so without harming our clinicians or our patients?” Lu says. “It was taking the modes of delivery and immediate, virtual collaboration that we used to not know beyond our four walls and rethink the entire concept.”
Lu remembers a joke that if someone wanted to solve simple problems, make money fast, and do it easily, go into anything but healthcare. But if that person liked complex problems, liked truly helping people, and if their heart was in the right place, maybe healthcare is the right challenge for them. And for Lu, the right place for her was at Northwell health, with 21 hospitals, about 900 outpatient facilities, and more than 80,000 team members and growing.
Working in collaboration with the ever-shifting city, state, and communities, the massive healthcare system worked around the clock to accommodate a massive influx of contagious patients in a world that locked down immediately.
“It was the exact opposite of the system regulatory work we had just been through,” Lu recalls. “We were able to think on our feet and push ahead, and there are so many lessons that we took from that experience that are driving decisions we make today.”
One of those critical lessons is that both patient and clinician expectations have changed for good. Lu says best-of-breed ecosystems and tech stacks, as they stand now, are not ready to make the great leap into the future. Those new expectations are driving ahead technological innovation that was already underway at Northwell, but the lessons learned during COVID have provided wind in the sails of those pushing for tech innovation in healthcare.
For Lu’s team, that meant reinvesting in the foundation, setting sail for the race.
“Several years ago, you always heard that everyone wanted to do analytics, to be data-rich, and that there was so much that could be done with technology,” the CIO says. “But at the end of the day, if you do not map that technology to where you can rationalize that data to be used for decision support across the organization—and even have some governance and stewardship investing in it—you can’t make that leap into tomorrow. It just doesn’t work that way.”
Northwell is modernizing its tech stacks and figuring out the ways in which data usage can best be used to accelerate and optimize operations, research, intelligent automation, data-driven decision-making, and so much more.
There is also a broader transformational approach to bringing back the joy of caregiving to clinicians and easing the technological, administrative burden of applications, systems, and an ecosystem of interrelated technologies that may not always synergize well. The goal is to simplify down to one integrated electronic health record to help patients easily access and understand their own healthcare journeys, and scale that technology to open up to patients, families, and caregivers as the regulatory landscape continues to shift.
Lu says the vision and support from Northwell leadership is resolute. Multiple retreats and workshops are conducted to deep dive into pain points, strategize, and plan out how to rationalize, standardize, and evolve systems to be agile and meet any changes in healthcare.
“Digital transformation is going to ultimately simplify things under the hood, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy,” Lu says. “But as we continue to move toward the cloud, upgrade the tech stack, and simplify our ecosystem, we can see all of the benefits—cross-functional benefits—that are going to give our clinicians and operations more time to focus on the mission of raising health and the best care delivery for our communities.”
Lu brings the work she does every day back to the thousands of patients her organization serves every day. She embraces the fact that the decisions she makes will ultimately affect a patient in some way.
Her organization spent the past year planning this year of action, and now the time is here. It’s time to double down and accelerate those plans. It’s a big year for Sophy Lu, but this is what she signed up for, and she is honored to be surrounded by amazing individuals to make a difference every day.
As healthcare technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, the role of CIOs in the industry has become increasingly vital. These leaders are key to managing patient data. Northwell Health’s Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer Sophy Lu continues to focus on driving modernization while improving overall patient outcomes. Verato is honored to have Northwell Health as a customer and to be working alongside Sophy to improve patient experiences through accurate identity management by knowing who is who™.
