There is a fundamental problem in healthcare, and Saad Chaudhry wants to solve it. “While we are in the business of lengthening your existence, the industry at large also continues to quietly rob you of it in small — and sometimes, not-so-small — increments,” he wrote in a recent piece.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Leaders have an opportunity to help turn the tide and “give back time,” whether it’s providing a safe and simple way for patients to schedule appointments and pay bills, or creating a “digital workplace” for employees. During a recent podcast interview with Kate Gamble, Managing Editor and Director of Social Media, Chaudry talked about why the concept of giving back time is so important to him and how it has “seeped into” his strategy at Luminis Health, where he was recently promoted to Chief Digital and Information Officer, and why he believes there is no ‘digital front door’ — just a digital door.

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Bold Statements

The concept of giving back is certainly not new, especially in healthcare. “Every day since Meaningful Use saw the first ray of sunshine, all of us have been talking about how it takes so much time to document.”

Mortality is still a difficult concept for people to process and discuss, said Chaudhry, particularly in a business setting. Reversing that trend is a critical step in giving back time.

“Stop getting into the complexity of looking at things from a vendor perspective, from a cloud transition perspective, from this digital perspective versus technology perspective, and just distill it.”

Although healthcare is designed to give back time, “we steal time from you in small and sometimes not-so-small increments in an ongoing way.”

Doing so, however, won’t necessarily be easy, especially for users. “If we have to make our technology landscape more complex, if I need to custom develop something because what I’m about to implement just doesn’t give time back, then I’ll do it.”

Q&A with Saad Chaudhry, Chief Digital & Information Officer, Luminis Health, Part 1

Gamble:  Hi Saad, great to speak with you. You wrote a piece for LinkedIn a little while back about giving back time. Can you talk about this concept and why it resonates with you?

Chaudhry:  Sure. The tricky thing about that entire idea is that the phrasing. To ‘give back time’ is not a new concept. Because every day since Meaningful Use saw the first ray of sunshine, all of us have been talking about how it takes so much time to document. Our physicians are saying we lose pajama time. Our nurses are saying we have to document after our rounds because it’s not exactly that easy to do it during the rounds, there’s too many clicks, there’s too much writing, all that stuff.

The idea of time being a factor has been around in the nomenclature for so long. I’ve tried to distill the idea of what it means, the factor of time in healthcare at large, to something very basic that I myself in my personal life have been obsessed with.

We talk about complexities in every industry, but especially in healthcare. We talk about sub-sub complexities in healthcare technology like cybersecurity and digital transformation. We talk about how technology is going to transform healthcare businesses into digital businesses which is absolutely true. And it’s different than just installing software and data centers and everything that’s been done for decades and decades.

At the core of it all is human beings who are li...