Inside CHIME: ‘Leadership’ Talk Looks at How IT Team Helped Break Cycle of Abuse

Inside CHIME - header

9.14.17
By Candace Stuart, Director of Communications & Public Relations, CHIME

Being leading edge in healthcare sometimes invokes bold actions and take-charge attitudes that challenge conventional thinking and practices. But as the kickoff presenter at CHIME17’s new “Leadership from the Edge” program proves, in some circumstances being leading edge means working quietly in the background to ensure one of the most vulnerable and at-risk populations receives medical care without the usual IT protocols.

Donna Roach, Interim CIO, Gulf Coast Health Ministry – Ascension Information Services

That patient population? Victims of human trafficking, who annually include about 50,000 women and children in the U.S, according to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. By some estimates human trafficking nets $150 billion a year for a growing global criminal industry. Donna Roach, CIO of Ascension Information Services, will share how Ascension’s Via Christi Health in Wichita, Kan., designed and implemented a program in 2015 to treat and protect these patients. For the initiative to succeed, IT had to keep a low profile.

“This was all about protecting the individual who was being abused and knowing the moment somebody finds out that some kind of intervention is being done, it could quickly shut down what was happening,” she said. Understanding that gathering registration and billing data might scare off victims of human trafficking, Via Christi’s informatics and clinical application analysts worked with physicians, nurses, social workers, community organizations and local police to develop a documentation process that didn’t reveal the victims’ identity. They also designed a training program for clinicians to help them identify signs of victimization.

“We get very focused on the electronic medical record and automating things and being innovative,” said Roach, who was CIO at Via Christi at the time of the program’s rollout. “This is being innovative in a different way. Rather than putting the computer system in the center it puts the patient, or in this case the victim, in the center.”

The program has been integrated into about a half dozen other Ascension sites since its launch two years ago. More than 1,900 clinicians and physicians have been trained on how to use the protocol and how to best serve victims. For 2017, they interceded in 65 cases in Wichita alone.

“That is 65 people who have come into the emergency room or physician’s office and we made a difference in their lives,” she said, successfully breaking the cycle of victimization for them.

“Leadership from the Edge” is a new offering at CHIME17 that features TED-like presentations from CIOs who share a strategic vision for healthcare in the future. Other presenters include Mike Martz, CIO at MIO Gulf Coast Ministry, who will present “The Future of Interoperability”; and the duo Theresa Meadows, vice president and CIO at Cook Children’s Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, and George Reynolds, M.D., retired CIO and CMIO and now principal of Reynolds Healthcare Advisers, with “The Rapidly Changing (Vanishing) Role of the CIO: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.”

More information about Leadership from the Edge is available here. It is part of the CHIME17 Fall CIO Forum, which will be held Oct. 31-Nov. 3 in San Antonio, Texas. To learn more about CHIME17 or to register for the forum, please go here.

More Inside CHIME Volume 2, No. 18: