One of the most difficult aspects of being a CIO is in making sure teams recognize the affect their work has on patient care. What often happens, according to Ray Lowe, is that IT professionals “get lost behind the bits and bytes and don’t see the impact.” However, when they are able to see that technology can change peoples’ lives, “it’s really rewarding,” said Lowe during a recent interview with Kate Gamble, Managing Director at healthsystemCIO.

A perfect example is the work AltaMed Health Services is doing to improve health equity by leveraging social determinants of health data. It’s an area he believes is “ripe for opportunity” — and one in which his organization has an edge because of the partnerships they’ve established with community-based organizations.

In the interview, Lowe spoke about how AltaMed is incorporating SDoH data to provide individualized care — and why that’s so critical; the need for CIOs to incorporate three “I’s” into the role; and what he considers to be his ultimate objective. He also talks about AltaMed’s laser focus on social justice, and why it’s more important than ever for healthcare leaders to share knowledge.

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Key Takeaways

* With AltaMed’s Health Equity Accelerator, one of the key goals is to create customized SDoH screenings based on data and partner with community-based organizations.

* The challenge? Finding the right people and startups that will enable them to identify and address needs at the individual level.

* For Lowe, the appeal in coming to AltaMed was clear: “Social justice is at our core,” and “culturally sensitive care is one of our hallmarks.”

* One of the most important aspects of the CIO role is in helping IT teams see the impact of the work they do. “Oftentimes we get lost in the bits and bytes.”

* As healthcare leaders, “we have to help each other. We have to generously share what we’ve learned so we can all help each other and continue to change the way healthcare is delivered.”

Q&A with Ray Lowe, CIO, AltaMed Health Services, Part 2 [Click here to view Part 1]

Gamble:  One of the areas you said you’re focused on is the Health Equity Accelerator. Can you talk more about that?

Lowe:  We’re working looking at the data to create a customized SDoH screening so that we can do positive and negative screenings and really partner with community-based organizations. We want to partner with government policymakers as well, so that we can have proper legislation changes put into place. It really looks at how do you recognize the individual in addressing social determinants of health? And I think the term ‘SDoH’ may evolve and morph into something else, like perhaps personal determinants of health, so we can better understand what each person needs versus a generic population. It’s very genericized when we use these broad terms — we need to focus on how we impact the individual.

 

“Just scratching the surface” with social determinants

Gamble:  What phase is the Health Equity Accelerator in right now?

Lowe:  We’re aligning with the Health Equity Institute; we’ve actually done quite a bit of research around what are the opportunities we have to leverage data within our patient population. It’s very rich. We live in a market where we know, through the social vulnerability index,