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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Key Takeaways

* Using Epic Refuel, Luminis is conducting a “massive” reset of EHR components and modules across the organization that will help “give back time to both our users and our patients.”

* “I’ve stopped using the words ‘digital front door’ at this point because there are back doors and side doors.”

* By partnering with a vendor to integrate ambulatory and inpatient payment models, Luminis is bringing bill pay “into the modern age” and improving the consumer experience, Chaudhry said.

* One of the key considerations with improving workflow? Making sure it meets the needs of your workflow, which entails involving people from different generations. “I don’t want to do this in a vacuum.”

* Adding digital to a title is great, but “if you truly believe in digital transformation and you want to have a digital leader, you need the scope to go with it.”

Q&A with Saad Chaudhry, CDIO, Luminis Health, Part 2 [Click here to view Part 1].

Gamble:  Can you talk more about the ‘true digital transformation’ projects that are going to change peoples’ job? It’s really fascinating.

Chaudhry:  I’d like to talk about something a little bit more rote first: the EHR. That’s a known quantity; the cost of doing business. That’s not innovative in any way at this point. Everybody has one. We’re an Epic shop. We’ve been an Epic shop for 13-plus years. That means we have built up a lot of debt with workflows by not taking certain updates because we felt we had another system that did the job, and then missed out on a whole branch of Epic development that came out after it, and so on.

Epic has a project called Refuel, where they basically reset certain components of their EHR suite. We are doing it on a massive scale with a reset of the entire EHR; we use pretty much all of their modules. There are two layers to this. First, we reset the foundation; that’s the terminology that Epic uses for ‘out of the box,’ which is the best practice for that specific function. There are over 20 modules of Epic, and each has hundreds of functions. That’s the foundation.

However, because healthcare is complex and layered and differs from one state and one specialty to the next, Epic can’t know the best practice out of the box for everything, and they can’t just pre-program it. And so, the second layer is wherever there’s a need to configure,