Podcast
Bringing the Joy Back to Medicine
Stephanie Lahr
President of Artisight
Our healthcare systems will never experience the transformational changes they need unless we consider the system-level solutions that are capable of leading to widespread change. Luckily, Stephanie Lahr and Artisight are on the frontlines of this industry-wide battle. Stephanie began her career as an internal medicine physician, but she was always fascinated by the intersection of health IT and care delivery. Now, several years later, Stephanie has leveraged her experience as a physician to uniquely excel in multiple administrative roles that are not commonly occupied by physicians. Her unique experience and background lay the groundwork for the fascinating conversation she had with host John Farkas, in which they discuss several best practices for creating systematic change in healthcare.
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Transcript
Avoiding Traditional Career Paths and Looking To Solve Problems
John Farkas:
Welcome everybody to Healthcare Market Matrix. We are excited today to have in our studios, Stephanie Lahr, who is the former CIO and CMIO of Monument Health, but is now the president of Artisight. And Stephanie, I would love to start out by having you tell us a little bit about your journey. Tell us a little bit about your background and backdrop, what led you into the realm of the CIO, CMIO, and then really, the story about how you got to Artisight because I think that says a lot about who you are and how you approach your work. But I’d love to have you tell us that story.
Stephanie Lahr:
Thanks, John. Really excited to be here, and happy to share that story. Maybe first of all, because I guess what I would say generally in principle as I look at my career, doesn’t follow a normal trajectory. No one would look at the starting point and where I am now and say, “Yeah, that was definitely a straight line,” nothing even close to that, which I think is great, right? I think breaking the bounds of that and following your true inspiration and going where you think you need to go is what we really want to all be able to do. And so it’s fun for me to be able to share how that’s progressed in my journey. So as you mentioned…
So maybe first starting with I’m an internal medicine physician by background and practiced as a hospitalist for lots of years, but found myself, very early in my career, kind of at that intersection of health IT and care delivery, and really doing it more from the perspective of a physician who realized we were going to be leveraging technology in new ways, saw the value in that, but also saw the opportunity for it to be better than it was, and realized that sitting on the sidelines and complaining was probably not going to be a super effective way to make things better. And so I should just jump in and figure out how I could be helpful. That then turned into, again, more of a career, becoming board certified in clinical informatics and really developing an acumen and education and understanding about how I could apply my skills best in that space. At Monument, I came to the organization in 2016 to be the CMIO to lead EPIC implementation and really work with the clinical teams on the adoption of a platform system across the whole health system and for the betterment of our community.
And got that work done, big project, a lot of fun, a lot of work, made really great connections into the community at large, as well as within the health system, realized that I wanted to provide as much value here as I could. And around the time that that was all coming to fruition, the CIO that I reported to was retiring, and the CEO of the health system at the time came to me and said, “Gosh, it seems like it could make sense to have a physician be the leader of our IT teams and really help set that strategy and make sure that it’s unified with where we’re going directionally as the organization at large. And would you be willing to be the CIO?”
And so I thought, well, I’m not a hundred percent sure what that even means or what I’ll be doing, but yes, I’ll do it. And surrounded myself again with a good network of people and mentors who could help support, never afraid to ask those folks a question on kind of where to go and how to do things, and dove into that work. And so in 2018, in January of 2018, I took on the combined role of CIO and CMIO. And the great part about that combined role is I got to take a much broader look at technology and how it was used across the health system. And that meant everything from looking at the network and network stability and how the infrastructure of our network and our data centers and how data moved and flowed was going to be essential to all of the clinical applications that we would want to lay on top of it, and bringing that together and helping our teams set the vision and the priorities and translate that to the operational leaders of our healthcare community was really a great experience for me.
During the time I was doing that work, I got more dedicated to this concept that we have a lot of great base systems and they are providing a great foundation for where we need to go, but we need to start thinking about the actual clinicians and the work that they’re doing, and the impact of this technology on them. And what I was seeing was rising levels of burnout and frustration with the systems that we were using, not necessarily because the systems themselves were wrong in some way, but just they weren’t designed for the work. They weren’t designed around the work of a clinician. They were designed as an additive to that work. And so my two mantras kind of became #reducethefriction and #bringbackthejoytomedicine. And I meant that in a really broad way.
Joining Artisight and Creating Transformation in Healthcare
Stephanie Lahr:
So I started looking for tools and ways to help our organization move beyond some of that. And fortunately, I had the blessing of being at an organization that wanted to be forward thinking and was willing to try some things, others. So in June of 2021, alongside my chief nursing officer, we went to an innovation meeting with several other health systems in California where we were introduced to a company called Artisight. And I was told, as we went into that meeting, “I think you’re going to really like this. The CEO is another physician, and I think the direction is a great direction, but we want your real thoughts and opinions on this.” And I go into pitches like that, typically a little bit skeptical, keeps me honest from the shiny butterfly syndrome. And so I went in, and sort of hilariously, in walked this young guy in a baseball cap and a Lululemon sweatshirt, and I thought, this is interesting.
And then 45 minutes later, we were all just completely captivated. The solution that he was talking about, leveraging computer vision and other sensors to automate care at the bedside really focused on what’s the work of our clinicians, and what is the work that they are doing that probably doesn’t need to be done by them? And how do we start to unwind that? How do we give them that time back, that opportunity to be more present with patients and focused on that care? And so we were extremely compelled, came back to the organization, shared that with our senior leadership team, had an opportunity, through the board, to propose this as an innovation project, and jumped into this idea of really figuring out how we could use this platform across the entirety of our organization to transform, knowing that transformation in healthcare is a journey more than it is a destination, and it’s not something that’s going to happen overnight.
And so it was really this sense of we got to get started now because it’s going to take a while for us to get what we need to get done. So we jumped right in, started with some initial projects around some problems that we needed to solve, things like even just hand hygiene monitoring, assisting our remote sitter program with technology that could help them identify falls, leveraging algorithms, working with remote nursing opportunities, looking at our ORs and optimization. And as we started this work, I, at the same time, was involved in CHIME leadership and HIMSS leadership as well, to an extent had another of opportunities to speak on podcasts and national platforms and just found that I couldn’t help myself from starting to tell this story. Even though it was just at the beginning, I just thought, everybody needs to know that this kind of technology is really finally here.
And when our physicians look at us and our nurses look at us quizzically like, “Really? Another technology? And you’re sure it’s going to help me because I don’t know?” I felt with utter confidence, the answer is yes, this is going to help. And so the CEO, Andrew, and I started some conversations. And he said, “Gosh, you seem pretty excited about this work.” And I said, “Well, I think it’s the future.” And he said, “Well, great. How about a future here at Artisight, where you can bring your knowledge and experience both as a physician, as a leader in an organization and a health IT leader, and help us grow and expand and be the best that we can be as a company.” And I think his last words to me after I signed my offer letter were, “Okay, let’s go fix healthcare.” So that’s what we’re on a journey to do.
John Farkas:
No small mandate. That’s awesome.
How Hurricane Ike Led Stephanie to a Career in Medical Informatics
John Farkas:
So several rewinds I’d like to take here, and a few bus stops I’d like to make. So starting your journey as a clinician, you were your doctor. You said hospitalist, right?
Stephanie Lahr:
Yep.
John Farkas:
So do you remember the moment that was kind of the transition, or what got you interested in jumping into the CMIO role? Because that’s a big move and a very different focus. Worth saying, chief medical information officers are almost always, if not always, physicians, right?
Stephanie Lahr:
Almost always. Yep.
John Farkas:
Yeah. And so what was that moment? What got you to look at that role? And what was the mandate that you saw there that got you interested?
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah. Well, maybe a quick rewind further than that. It’s kind of where the passion around this area came from. I trained in Galveston, Texas, is where I was doing my internal medicine residency. And I don’t know if I’ve told you this story before, but we had a hurricane in 2008, Hurricane Ike, and I had five feet of water in my own house.
John Farkas:
Wow.
Stephanie Lahr:
The university system basically closed for many months because the infrastructure of the entire island was gone. There was no power, there was no running water, nothing. But we had obviously thousands of patients that were also going through an extreme time, and displaced and needed guidance. And so we had been in the fortunate position of going through actually an EPIC implementation just a couple of years before that, which was pretty early in that whole timeframe, because this is like 2005, 2006.
But the great thing was, because we were electronic at that point, two weeks after the storm, maybe even a little less, I was asked to go to… Because I was almost done with my residency, so I was pretty well equipped to go ahead and start handling and treating patients on my own with minimal supervision. And so I was given an office, I don’t even think it had any windows, and a computer and a fax machine and a telephone. And they said, “Patients are going to call. There’s messages in the system. We need to help them.” And I had everything I needed. I could see all of their hospitalization records, all of their clinic records, all of their prescriptions. I could resend prescriptions to new places. I could send records to clinics or hospitals where they maybe were receiving care because they couldn’t receive it from us. And it was really, really powerful because I knew and had been a part of the health system when we were on paper, and all of those records were literally soggy and underwater…
John Farkas:
Wow.
Stephanie Lahr:
… 20 miles away. And we would never have been able to provide the support to the community that we needed to do during that time of crisis for them, but also for us, if we didn’t have that platform. And so that was a moment for me where I was like, okay, this is the way the world is going. We have to do this, and we have to do it as well as we can. So when I went into private practice, honestly, it kind of just happened organically. I was very interested in helping be a part, again, of the solution. I met with the CEO of the health system. I remember during my interview, I said, “Hey, do you use an EHR? And can I be kind of a part of what your work is in that space?” And he looked at me like, “Wait, rewind. You’re a doctor who was interested in using an EHR and wants help?”
John Farkas:
“I’ve never seen that before.”
Stephanie Lahr:
“I’ve never seen this before.” And again, it was pretty early. In fact, this was the time when organizations like AMDIS, the American Medical Director for Information Systems organization was alive and well. But CMIO wasn’t even a term. It was medical directors of information systems, right?
John Farkas:
And CMIO is a relatively recent, relatively recent position, right? And if I’m understanding right, if I were to characterize this role, it’s essentially the nexus within a hospital or provider organization that bridges the gap between practicing clinicians and the IT department. Is that a fair characterization?
Stephanie Lahr:
It’s the translator. Absolutely. And what happened for me, yep, I was dealing with my own partners, and then the leadership team of IT said, “How about go talk to the ER doctors? Could you go talk to the ICU docs? Hey, the physical therapists are struggling with something. Maybe you could help them too.” And we had nurse informaticists already in the organization. And so it really just became this symbiosis with me as kind of the leader of then that informatics team to, again, take what were the needs of the operational teams and translate them into what we could and couldn’t do with technology. Because sometimes being a CMIO means saying no. It’s not always about saying yes, but it’s figuring out how to turn that no into something that can still be impactful and positive. And so you really had to know and learn the technology side as well, and then translate the two across to each other.
Bridging the Gap Between Clinicians and IT
John Farkas:
Did you find yourself… In that role, were you most often going from clinicians up or IT down? And I put that in a unfortunate hierarchy because it doesn’t need to be up or down, but you know what I mean. Which direction were you most frequently advocating in?
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah, I was most frequently advocating to the technical teams, what the clinicians needed. And the other thing was actually bringing together, even from different clinical areas, how to do a synergistic approach. So as an example, pharmacy may have felt they needed one thing, but it had an impact on physicians that they didn’t want, and maybe an impact on nursing that they didn’t want. And so it wasn’t even always just translating to IT, what the needs were of the teams, but it was sometimes interrelation communication between clinicians to say, “I understand that pharmacy really needs this. Is there a way that we can do that that doesn’t cause this secondary issue for the physicians?” And prior to that, there was nobody doing that work, and so you ended up in situations where actually, typically what happened is you blamed the technology. “Well, if this stupid system could just do it like this, it would be fine.”
And then we dig in and say, “Oh. Huh. As a matter of fact, it can.” How did we arrive at this decision? Oh, we arrived at this decision because we asked one group how it needed to work. Because it was the pharmacy module, so we asked pharmacists. Well, the pharmacy module lives inside an ecosystem of a whole bunch of other things. And so that was, actually a lot of the work was bringing multi-disciplines of even clinicians together and figuring out uniformly, what did we need as a group so that could be translated to IT? Because IT can do a lot of things, but they can’t code it two ways, one way for pharmacy and one way for physicians. That’s why we went to platforms, was to eliminate that. So that was a lot of those conversations.
Why CMIOs Are Impactful Strategic Leaders
John Farkas:
And so you’re really in that role of… You said translation layer, which I think is a really good, but also just a very active problem solver, just working very hard to say, okay, we’ve got this capability, this piece of technology, this piece of infrastructure that is a little bit of a square peg. We got to sand off some of these edges to make sure it slots in here the way the clinicians need it and will fit their workflow, will fit the way they want to do their jobs. It’s never going to be a perfect match, but it’s your job, in that sense, to make it the best match it can be.
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah. The other thing I think was really amazing about the CMIO role and most of the CMIOs that I meet, CMIOs and the other informaticists on the technology teams or in organizations tend to know more about how the organization works at its deepest level than anyone else.
John Farkas:
Almost anybody else. Yeah.
Stephanie Lahr:
Because our tools will never work if it doesn’t tie in well to what the workflows are. And if you tell us this is your workflow, and then we go and build the system to do it. And really, that’s not actually how you do it. You just didn’t maybe want to say, “Well, in real life every day, we do it like this.” So then we’d go in when things were broken and figure out, well, what’s really going on here? And then we’d unravel the layers of, so actually, you don’t do it like that 80% of the time. And so a lot of it too, was creating first a safe environment to say, “Don’t tell me what I want to hear. You guys are clinicians. Do you want a patient to tell you what you want to hear or do you want a patient to tell you the truth? We’re in the same place. We want to build tools that work for you, but I have to know your real work in order to do that.”
And so it was an amazing place to be, and also made a CMIO a really great strategic leader for an organization at large. Because when an organization is looking at strategic vision and goals that they have to accomplish, the CMIO can tell you a lot of the deep dark secrets you may not know that are going to have to be worked through in order to make those kinds of transformational changes. It can be a challenging place to be too, because it means where most of the frustrations and challenges are, and that’s kind of the space that you live in. But knowing that you’re chipping away at those and helping to set a new vision and hoping that you also then execute on that is where the fun comes.
John Farkas:
And so if you’re bringing a product to market that has a strong tie to the clinician, that solves a real problem that they’re facing, but maybe it has a pretty steep curve to get it integrated or adopted in the system, the CMIO is going to be a good place for you to start your process because they’re going to know the anatomy of what it’s going to take to connect the dots…
Stephanie Lahr:
Absolutely.
John Farkas:
.. or if it will even make sense and fit. Because at the end of the day, they have a very integral knowledge of… They don’t just know the clinical side of it, but they know the spectrum of what it’s going to take to make it actually happen and make sense.
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah, absolutely. And organizations that are lucky enough to be of size where they have a CNIO, or a Chief Nursing Information Officer, same kind of thing, right? There’s a whole… Informatics in nursing has been probably in place longer than even on the physician side. And so again, really strong advocates and people that you want to work through, not only… Yes, if you’re trying to sell something, they’re a great person to get that advocacy from. But actually beyond that, advisory, right? I think there’s a lot of companies that would benefit from having, and it doesn’t have to be anything massive, but an advisory kind of group that helps make sure that where they’re going is aligned with the problems they think they’re trying to solve. And CMIOs and CNIOs are fabulous at that because they sit at that intersection all the time, and they can give you objective feedback.
John Farkas:
Yeah. They know actually, actually what’s happening, which is really important.
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah. And they have administrative time to probably be able to dedicate to that, right? Asking a practicing physician, “Can you be on an advisory board for a surgical tool?” Honestly, probably not. They’re just too busy taking care of patients, and we want them to do that. CMIOs and CNIOs are in an administrative role, and it does give them that opportunity.
Stephanie’s Experience Transitioning from CMIO to CIO
John Farkas:
Gotcha. Okay. That is some great perspective. So you made what I think is the unusual bridge from CMIO to CIO because there are far fewer physicians in the CIO role, from my experience. Talk about what that looked like for you and what it meant to cross that bridge practically.
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah. I think, well, first of all, it is a small but mighty, and I think growing group of people. And I think it’s happening…
John Farkas:
And appropriately so, I think, right?
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah. I was going to say I don’t think it’s happening by accident.
John Farkas:
Yeah, it makes sense. It’s a hospital after all.
Stephanie Lahr:
Exactly. It’s the reason we’re now seeing CEOs of health systems be physicians as well, and probably not surprising then to put the CIO not that far behind it, depending on the role of the CIO. And that’s unique, chief digital officers, chief healthcare information officers. There’s different ways to structure this. But having a physician sort of at the helm of providing the strategic visioning leadership and back to the rest of the senior leadership team, the partnership on kind of how to drive the ship makes a ton of sense, because the reality is medicine is becoming more and more dependent on technology every day, and so ensuring that alignment is there is going to be essential. This is not just a commodity anymore. IT is not just a ticket taker shop, nor are the clinicians people that we’re just going to force technology onto. There has to be that unification of the two to make sure that we’re all solving the right problems. So for me…
John Farkas:
And just to level set, so you’re moving from the bridge, the bridge between the hospital and the IT department to the IT department. So the CIO, if I were to characterize that position, they’re overseeing the selection and implementation, optimization of anything information technology related. So they’re the ones that are making that piece happen, and they’re typically reporting to, I’m guessing most often reporting to the CEO in that situation. Is that true?
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah. This is evolutionary as well. But as we see, the CIO, or whatever letter you’re going to put in there, become more of a strategic part of the team, I think it is definitely more and more common. I reported to the CEO, and I think a lot of my colleagues are in that space. So yes, as far as the decision making, obviously we tried to make that more of a governance related opportunity, but the reality was all of the coordination, and then making sure that the right resources at the right time were deployed to make sure all of those things happened was my responsibility. I had several hundred people reporting to me. I had tens of millions of dollars in budget that was my responsibility, and a strategic vision to help set alongside my other leaders to make sure that the foundations that we were going to set in tech technology were going to get us to where we needed to go, but that we were, at the same time, being visionary and forward thinking, because we know that technology was moving so fast, that we had to be thinking several years out.
So it was a growth experience for me. I certainly had never had… Nobody in medical school teaches you how to manage a 30 or 40 or 50 or 150 million budget. Nobody teaches you exactly what it means to be a visionary leader. In fact, some of medical school is the antithesis of that, right? The doctor is the tip of a different kind of team. And while team-based care has become much more common, and I think was a great element, for me as a hospitalist coming into this, that’s different than leading large teams and providing vision without micromanaging. We as doctors can tend to be micromanages because…
John Farkas:
That’s [inaudible 00:26:12]
Stephanie Lahr:
… the life of a person is at risk. And so being able to take a step back and allow other leaders to grow, to cultivate other leaders was a different area that I had to go out and really do some purposeful work in figuring out, how do I know myself? What are my shortcomings? And how do I grow in these areas to be a better leader?
John Farkas:
Yeah. So when you moved from that position, which I would say is certainly on the clinical side of the spectrum from the CMIO, into the CIO, which goes far more into the business and transformation side of the spectrum, how would you characterize the primary mind shift or change you had to make in your… Or what maybe caught you by surprise, or what move did you have to make to inhabit that space?
Stephanie Lahr:
I, as a physician, had to realize that attorneys are my friends, which is…
John Farkas:
That’s a big shift.
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah, it was. Really, I remember the first couple of meetings as the CIO that I had with our attorneys, I was as nervous… You would’ve thought that I was personally being investigated for something, even though it was never anything to do with that. But just the physician in me kept thinking malpractice and all those kinds of things. So it took some time.
John Farkas:
Danger, danger, danger.
Stephanie Lahr:
Yes, exactly. Danger ahead. It took some time. And actually, by the time I left the organization, I would say the legal team were probably some of my closest partners. And even at Artisight, I find myself saying, “I just want to run this past our attorneys.” So that was probably a big part. The FFO relationship, also a major element that I needed to cultivate and understand, because the reality was I was now the person who had to make sure that we had the money to do the things we needed and wanted to do, and how to translate that, and how to justify that and create the ROI on that, which meant I needed [inaudible 00:28:16]
John Farkas:
And from an infrastructure standpoint, you had one of the biggest budgets on the spectrum.
Stephanie Lahr:
Absolutely. Right. Which brought a lot of attention as well.
John Farkas:
Sure.
Stephanie Lahr:
So I needed to learn about budgets. For me, I was like, capital and operating, why do we have a difference? It seems weird. Let’s just have one bucket of money. Why does it have to be like this? Right? So these were things that I had to learn why they are the way they are. Sometimes you don’t need to ask necessarily why all the way to the deepest levels, but this is how it is, and just you’re going to have to work around it. But understanding that, and then again, creating that partnership with the CFO so that I could understand from their perspective what the challenges were and figure out how to bring those things together. So those were unique relationships that I had to foster that really were not on my radar at all as a CMIO.
The Do’s and Don’t’s of Pitching to a CIO
John Farkas:
So one of the things that I am aware of as we look at this particular position, is that if I look at… Coming at it from a I’m a health tech company, I’m trying to find my way into a hospital system, I would venture to guess that maybe other than the CEO, the CIO has the biggest hedge of protection around them, because, oh my gosh, I think every… If you walk the floor at HIMSS, I think everybody in that space has, on their list of ideal targets, the CIO is pretty much on there. And if not the primary, certainly a secondary, which means that you’re not giving anybody your real email. You’re not giving… So talk about that. If somebody is trying to get an idea across, how are you taking in information? How are you people engaging with you?
Stephanie Lahr:
You’re definitely right. I got hundreds of emails a day. In fact, even still…
John Farkas:
Let’s just pause for a second. Hundreds of emails a day.
Stephanie Lahr:
A day.
John Farkas:
So let’s just… So what is possible about… It’s not possible to.
Stephanie Lahr:
It’s not. So honestly, mostly what that meant was don’t bother. If you’re sending an email that’s some sort of quick pitch of what your product is. The likelihood that I was going to look at it was almost zero. Every once in a while…. Typically what I would do in the morning, because a lot of them came in right through everybody’s CRMs, they all send them out at sometime in the morning, and so…
John Farkas:
Tuesdays, Tuesdays at 8:30.
Stephanie Lahr:
Yes, exactly. So in the morning I would kind of get up, and over coffee, I’d hit edit on my phone. And I’d just start swiping down, and I would select literally everything. And I’d quickly kind of glance at what the title was, but if it wasn’t a person I recognized and something that didn’t really stand out, it was mostly just a massive delete. Once in a while, something would stand out. People ask me all the time, “What is that something?” I’ll be honest, it was random. I almost think it was divine intervention. Every once in a while, for some reason, I’d stop on something. And I’d open it and oftentimes be like, huh, I actually might be interested in this, and then I’d push it out to my team or whatever. But email in general, terrible. A couple of things I say, while we’re on the topic of not working, it was very frustrating.
People get very aggressive about this, right? It’s a little paparazziesque, right? There’s the cool nature of, yes, we know you’re trying to sell something and you need access to me, but then there’s the crossing the line into not appropriate. People who just put calendar invites on your calendar as though they’ve sent you whatever, super annoying. CRM messages. In general, I can see that from a mile away. At a minimum. I love it… In fact, I have a colleague who has a company, and it literally says in the body of his message, “This message is generated by my CRM, but I hear I need to send out a mass communication, and so I’m just letting you know that this is where it’s from.” I could tell by… Even how it was titled to me, I could often tell what was generating it.
So those are not good things to do. I will say though, that I felt… So we talk about the wall. It took a couple of years. I felt like I was a wall a lot, and I put blocks up and I said, “Look, I’ll come find you when I’m ready.” I realized that that was not a good approach because there was so much out there and so much changing. I was putting a huge bias on what I could potentially bring into the organization because it was only through my own lens that I was willing to talk to somebody. So I actually started participating in some of, and this was during the pandemic when they were virtual, some of these virtual kinds of conferences. They’re pay to play kind of the 30 minute speed dating. That’s one of the things I really love about the ViVE Conference is that structure that they have. I think are great.
John Farkas:
You’re talking about the hosted buyer [inaudible 00:33:32]?
Stephanie Lahr:
Hosted buyer program, or reverse expo, or whatever different people call it. But it’s basically somewhere between five and 30 minutes of time where you just meet and hear about things. And the value of that is, even though there were a number of times that that was not a tool set that I needed at the moment, sometimes I filed it away for later because I thought, I think this is on our path just not right now. Or there were other times that made me say, I don’t even know if I’ve thought about that yet. And then I’d go back to my team and say, “Have we thought…” And then I’d go to colleagues across the nation, and I’d say, “Are you guys thinking about this yet?” And sometimes they’d say, “Yeah, we are.” And I’m like, “Gosh, I didn’t even realize that was coming at us. I need to start digging in and understanding.”
So I do think those kinds of programs provide value, but it’s hard because the volume is so high that you have to cut things off somewhere. So I do like those kinds of programs. A lot of it is colleague kinds of conversations as well, getting together with colleagues, both physically and virtually, and saying, “What are you using for this? Do you like this? What would you do differently?” That kind of stuff. But it’s a hard place to be as on the vendor side, which I now am recognizing and seeing from a different viewpoint.
John Farkas:
You are. You’re on the other side. Yeah, it is. So one of the things I hear very frequently from our clients, from others in the industry is, “We have great success when we get the opportunity to have a conversation.” And it’s that second part of that clause, it’s the secondary clause there, when we get the opportunity to have the conversation, that is so pivotal, right? Because how do you get that? How is that possible? I think it ends up being a big part of marketing’s challenge to compel that conversation to happen. How do you get people to the point where they want to have that conversation? And that’s not an easy thing, especially when you’re looking at somebody like a CIO. And so talk a little bit about how, when you are in that realm… So certainly, I hear the speed dating, the hosted buyer frameworks, those forums that afford organizations to get in and at least help somebody into how to think about the problem differently, because that’s part of it, right?
You’re a CIO. You’re in the middle of a storm. You’re not able to keep tabs on every new thing that’s coming out, or new approach to things that might be applicable. And so having somebody opportunity to tell you this story, it’s what you guys are facing right now in Artisight. How do we think about this problem, and how are we going to help the industry understand what’s different and special about our solution? So I hear the hosted buyer things. What else? What other kinds of things can organizations do that might have a shot at getting through? What are some of the things that you’ve experienced in the past?
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah, I think… Well, and maybe this is… Hopefully this isn’t super secret sauce I’m giving away from my own organization, but I came to an organization that already had clinical and healthcare people as a part of it. I think that is valuable in multiple ways. So the fact that we had physicians and nurses and operational leaders from health systems, that we have that at Artisight gives us a couple of opportunities. One, it means we’ve got networks of people that we know from that side, from being on the operational side, and so we can reach into those networks. Two, it allows you to maybe take a role more as a thought leader and providing guidance to the greater community, as opposed to selling a solution. And so if you can have the people on your team that are in a position to be knowledgeable and have the expertise to really help the community at large understand, to your point, the things that we’re trying to solve and the new ways to do it, you may have an opportunity to present yourselves in different forums than you would otherwise.
And the other thing that happens when you have people who are coming from operations into your companies is you’re probably better targeted. Your solution is probably better targeted to the problem because you have inside knowledge as to what that problem is, and then are much more likely to be able to solve it.
Utilizing Empathetic Authority to Solve Problems
John Farkas:
Yeah. That makes great sense. I call it empathetic authority. I think as an organization, it’s hard, because what I see is there’s a lot of tech companies that are chasing an opportunity, right? They’re coming to it. Somewhere in an accelerator they were involved in, they realized that this part of healthcare needed something, and they saw some dollar signs associated with it, and they worked to put together a solution. That’s kind of a gross way to put it, but it’s actually not uncommon. And so they’ll get enough expertise to work to solve the problem, and a big chunk of what they’re missing is the opportunity to clearly connect the dots. And that does require a lot of domain expertise and the ability… That’s one of the things I’m excited about and how Artisight is approaching it. We’re selling into the clinical environment, and we’ve got clinical leaders who’ve been there, done that, leading the charge. And I think that that ends up really not just transforming the approach to the market, but it transforms the approach to the solution.
You’re solving the problem in a way that makes sense because you’ve sat on that bridge.
Stephanie Lahr:
And I think the empathy side of what you mentioned as well really resonates with me because I have been, and I’ve said this… Even now in the role that I’m in and in different partnership agreements that we’re working on to grow as a company, I have said to people, “I sat in a boardroom and I pitched, as the CIO, the solution that I wanted to bring to the organization that we had brought through governance and those kinds of things that we felt was going to take us forward.” And I was successful at it most of the time, but every time I got the yes, someone else got a no. And sometimes that, no was, “We’re not buying new hospital beds.”
The new nurse call system is going to have to wait while we do whatever this other thing is that I was leading, every dollar that a health system spends is extremely important to me. And the value that they are getting for that dollar is extremely important to me. And the concept and the idea of people taking advantage of the opportunity of, here’s a problem that needs to be solved, I can make a buck, healthcare can’t afford that.
John Farkas:
Especially now.
Stephanie Lahr:
Especially now, but really never. Margins at health systems have never been margins to be admired. And so they’re doing a service for the community, for all of us. And so totally understand, even for a health system, no money, no mission, right? There has to be some back and forth exchange there. But foundationally, I can read that in my conversations with people. And if the conversation with you is really about sell, sell, sell, I’m done. Because what it really needs to be about is solve, solve, solve.
John Farkas:
And value, value, value, right?
Stephanie Lahr:
And value, value, value.
Prioritizing Solving over Selling
John Farkas:
Yeah. And that’s what I’m hearing really clearly. If I’m getting what… So if you’re a company coming to market and you’re wanting to make, from an empathetic perspective, you better have your value equation very well articulated and ready to, documented, articulated, and well constructed. Because if it’s sketchy or thin, as the CIO, you’re saying no to somebody to say yes to this solution, and it better be a really clear reason why. Because if it’s not, I’m going to go with the clear reason because I’m working with thin margins and it is too critical. We’re talking about how we are advancing the cause. That makes sense. And something I see really, it’s especially hard for early stage companies who haven’t been able to get all the way through the equations and don’t have the proof text all the way worked out.
But what I’m hearing is if you’re going to invest some time, effort, energy on anything, it’s to make sure that you’ve got a fine point on what those equations look like. It’s well researched, well documented, and something you can give, turn over to somebody and say, “Look, here’s the real numbers.” Is that…
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah. And if you’re still in that development phase, be willing to go into development relationships, right? Figure out how you’re going to do your financing. One other thing that’s amazing right now is because of all this attention in this space, again, a little more challenging today, but still possible, there’s tons of venture and private equity capital out there for companies, to get them… That’s what the whole point of that is, to get them through these early stages of development so that they can remain a company, but figure out what they really need to do. And so partner. Be honest with the health system and say, “Here’s where we are today. Here’s where we think we need to go. The reality is we need an ecosystem like yours to help us vet this out.” And do that a few times. Don’t sell it if it’s not ready to be sold. Find a way to build it together.
And again, easier said than done. Something has to keep the money of the company going. But I think those are times that you need to think about looking at financing opportunities and those kinds of partnership agreements so that you can take the time to go out and really make sure that your tool meets the needs, because nothing is worse on either side of this than tearing something out later.
Systematic Issues That CMIOs and CIOs Face
John Farkas:
Yep, absolutely. So as we kind of round third and head for home here, if you were to kind of thumbnail some of the big problems up in the grill of some of the, I guess of an average, let’s start on the CMIO realm, what are some of the things you’re aware of systemically that are broadly facing that position as problems? And then the same question for the CIO, but what are you seeing as some of the meta issues that are really there?
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah. On the CMIO, I think there’s probably two buckets I’d put it in. One is the, again, the burnout. How do they help the clinicians use tools that will really be helpful? How do we improve workflows, and yet do it in a way that can be somewhat flexible? Because we know that not every physician wants to practice in exactly the same way or needs the same thing, and not every nurse is going to do the exact same thing, so how do we help find those tools that can improve those workflows? And then the other thing I would say is probably on the decision support and the harnessing of all of the data that’s out there, as well as the quality of the data.
So back to the sort of burnout side of things. One of the reasons we see a lot of burnout is because of the administrative tasks. So I think CMIOs are looking at ways, and CNIOs are looking at ways of protecting their clinical people from the one more click, right? Don’t bring me a solution that is going to create great data, maybe maybe not, but requires one more click. Because one more click literally could be the difference between a nurse quitting her job or his job today or not.
John Farkas:
Yeah, because you’re already…
Stephanie Lahr:
And so how do you balance that/
John Farkas:
… several clicks. So adding one more is not a problem solve.
Stephanie Lahr:
Correct. And then the other thing on the data side is there’s so much to know. There’s so much to assimilate on an everyday basis, putting in front of us that… And things can happen almost silently if it’s happening in front of your eyes, right? So how do we use the data to create triggers, to create decision support, to create reminders, to create communication flow, so that as all of this data is coming in, we can actually do something with it? Because the human mind, in and of itself, is not going to be capable of digesting and using all of that information in real time. So how do we start to use it in ways where we can bring it to the right person at the right time for the right patient? And that means then also getting to this point of almost precision based care, right? What is the exact right blood pressure medicine for this patient…
John Farkas:
This patient, yeah.
Stephanie Lahr:
… who lives in this place, who has this history, who all of those kinds of things? So there’s tons of opportunity there. It’s going to take us a while to get there, but we’re not going to get there without, again, starting somewhere and marching our way toward it. And I think that our clinicians are really attuned, and CMIOs are really attuned to how do we improve that. On the CIO side, I think it’s thinking about the broader efficiencies of the organization at large. How do we help revenue cycle teams be efficient? How do we help even our IT teams be more efficient? How do we help the clinicians be more efficient? How do we bring the right data to our leaders so that they can make the best realtime decisions? How do we create new data that we’ve never had an opportunity to see before to be able to figure out directionally, is this clinic moving in the right direction or not?
And what changes might need to be made? At the hospital level, are the ORs as efficient as they need to be, or are they not? It’s going to be data that’s necessary for that, and process changes that are going to be needed. And I think the CIO is looking at that globally, not just from the clinical side, but again, all of the rest of the areas across the organization, because we’re seeing shortages in all of those areas. We don’t have enough people anywhere to do the amount of work that’s necessary. I will say there’s a great book called Upstream. It’s a healthcare specific book, and it talks about thinking upstream. I think this is a great book for anybody in our industry to read on which side of the aisle you’re sitting on. It talks about moving from solving the problem that’s sitting right in front of us to solving the upstream problem.
It starts with that old story about there’s kids in a river. And somebody’s walking by the river, and they see this kid in the river and they go and rescue him. Oh, good. We rescued the child. That happens four or five times. They pull five kids out of the water. And the one person that’s helping to do the rescue, the two people that are there, he takes off and heads up the river. And the other person says, “Where are you going?” “I’m going to figure out who’s throwing all these kids in the river and fix that problem.” Right? We spend a lot of time focused myopically on the problem that’s happening right now, and I’m seeing this even more today. Because as the financial pressures of the organizations are constraining down, we have this propensity to look much more directionally at just what’s happening right now, and how do I fix it. We’ve got to take a vision toward what’s going to happen in the future and look upstream and figure out, what’s the root of this problem, and how do we really solve it?
Closing Thoughts
John Farkas:
That is a great place to land the conversation, because really, that’s what we’re facing right now. We have to look at what are the systemic level solutions that are going to lead to real transformation at the end of the day?
Stephanie Lahr:
Absolutely.
John Farkas:
Because we can’t keep it going the way it is. We need some fundamental different ways of doing things, and we need leaders who have the courage to not just put out fires, but to look at the things that are going to be truly transformational and change the way it’s done. Because the system has to move, and we all know it. We all wrangle it every day.
Stephanie Lahr:
But what an amazing opportunity we all have to participate in that, and to potentially, if we’re successful, be able to look back in a handful of years and say, “I helped make that happen.”
John Farkas:
Yeah, it’s true. The good news is, from my perspective, I’m starting to see solutions emerge, I’d say Artisight is one of them, that truly have an opportunity to lead to in enormous, fundamentally good transformational change at the level it needs to happen to preserve the system. And that, to me, is encouraging. It’s been a while. I feel like the clouds are starting to part a little bit, and we’re starting to see, okay, how technology can really make a difference, instead of just adding complexity, which has been so true of so much of the stuff that’s happened in the last decade. We’re at the point now where some things are starting to cut through. And it’s an exciting moment, and I’m looking forward to how that manifests. And Stephanie, I’m grateful to you, not just for joining us here, but for the part in the conversation that you’re being in that. I think your perspective and what I’ve seen in our time interacting and getting to know you, you’re about that kind of change.
And we need more folks like you who have the courage to say, “Okay, here it is. And if we aren’t going to jump in and make this happen, bad things are happening. And if we do jump in and make it happen, good things are going to result.” So that’s why I’m excited about what you are on the trajectory to do now, and really grateful for the opportunity to have this conversation. So if you haven’t already, check out artisight.com, A-R-T-I-S-I-G-H-T.com, see what they’re doing. It is really remarkable technology that they’re bringing forward to change how clinicians are able to focus more of their energy at giving legitimate important care at the top of their license for the people that are in midst of episodes of care. I’m really excited to see what they’re having the opportunity to do. Again, Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us here today on our humble little podcast.
Stephanie Lahr:
Absolutely. Happy to do it. Great to see you.
Transcript (custom)
Avoiding Traditional Career Paths and Looking To Solve Problems
John Farkas:
Welcome everybody to Healthcare Market Matrix. We are excited today to have in our studios, Stephanie Lahr, who is the former CIO and CMIO of Monument Health, but is now the president of Artisight. And Stephanie, I would love to start out by having you tell us a little bit about your journey. Tell us a little bit about your background and backdrop, what led you into the realm of the CIO, CMIO, and then really, the story about how you got to Artisight because I think that says a lot about who you are and how you approach your work. But I’d love to have you tell us that story.
Stephanie Lahr:
Thanks, John. Really excited to be here, and happy to share that story. Maybe first of all, because I guess what I would say generally in principle as I look at my career, doesn’t follow a normal trajectory. No one would look at the starting point and where I am now and say, “Yeah, that was definitely a straight line,” nothing even close to that, which I think is great, right? I think breaking the bounds of that and following your true inspiration and going where you think you need to go is what we really want to all be able to do. And so it’s fun for me to be able to share how that’s progressed in my journey. So as you mentioned…
So maybe first starting with I’m an internal medicine physician by background and practiced as a hospitalist for lots of years, but found myself, very early in my career, kind of at that intersection of health IT and care delivery, and really doing it more from the perspective of a physician who realized we were going to be leveraging technology in new ways, saw the value in that, but also saw the opportunity for it to be better than it was, and realized that sitting on the sidelines and complaining was probably not going to be a super effective way to make things better. And so I should just jump in and figure out how I could be helpful. That then turned into, again, more of a career, becoming board certified in clinical informatics and really developing an acumen and education and understanding about how I could apply my skills best in that space. At Monument, I came to the organization in 2016 to be the CMIO to lead EPIC implementation and really work with the clinical teams on the adoption of a platform system across the whole health system and for the betterment of our community.
And got that work done, big project, a lot of fun, a lot of work, made really great connections into the community at large, as well as within the health system, realized that I wanted to provide as much value here as I could. And around the time that that was all coming to fruition, the CIO that I reported to was retiring, and the CEO of the health system at the time came to me and said, “Gosh, it seems like it could make sense to have a physician be the leader of our IT teams and really help set that strategy and make sure that it’s unified with where we’re going directionally as the organization at large. And would you be willing to be the CIO?”
And so I thought, well, I’m not a hundred percent sure what that even means or what I’ll be doing, but yes, I’ll do it. And surrounded myself again with a good network of people and mentors who could help support, never afraid to ask those folks a question on kind of where to go and how to do things, and dove into that work. And so in 2018, in January of 2018, I took on the combined role of CIO and CMIO. And the great part about that combined role is I got to take a much broader look at technology and how it was used across the health system. And that meant everything from looking at the network and network stability and how the infrastructure of our network and our data centers and how data moved and flowed was going to be essential to all of the clinical applications that we would want to lay on top of it, and bringing that together and helping our teams set the vision and the priorities and translate that to the operational leaders of our healthcare community was really a great experience for me.
During the time I was doing that work, I got more dedicated to this concept that we have a lot of great base systems and they are providing a great foundation for where we need to go, but we need to start thinking about the actual clinicians and the work that they’re doing, and the impact of this technology on them. And what I was seeing was rising levels of burnout and frustration with the systems that we were using, not necessarily because the systems themselves were wrong in some way, but just they weren’t designed for the work. They weren’t designed around the work of a clinician. They were designed as an additive to that work. And so my two mantras kind of became #reducethefriction and #bringbackthejoytomedicine. And I meant that in a really broad way.
Joining Artisight and Creating Transformation in Healthcare
Stephanie Lahr:
So I started looking for tools and ways to help our organization move beyond some of that. And fortunately, I had the blessing of being at an organization that wanted to be forward thinking and was willing to try some things, others. So in June of 2021, alongside my chief nursing officer, we went to an innovation meeting with several other health systems in California where we were introduced to a company called Artisight. And I was told, as we went into that meeting, “I think you’re going to really like this. The CEO is another physician, and I think the direction is a great direction, but we want your real thoughts and opinions on this.” And I go into pitches like that, typically a little bit skeptical, keeps me honest from the shiny butterfly syndrome. And so I went in, and sort of hilariously, in walked this young guy in a baseball cap and a Lululemon sweatshirt, and I thought, this is interesting.
And then 45 minutes later, we were all just completely captivated. The solution that he was talking about, leveraging computer vision and other sensors to automate care at the bedside really focused on what’s the work of our clinicians, and what is the work that they are doing that probably doesn’t need to be done by them? And how do we start to unwind that? How do we give them that time back, that opportunity to be more present with patients and focused on that care? And so we were extremely compelled, came back to the organization, shared that with our senior leadership team, had an opportunity, through the board, to propose this as an innovation project, and jumped into this idea of really figuring out how we could use this platform across the entirety of our organization to transform, knowing that transformation in healthcare is a journey more than it is a destination, and it’s not something that’s going to happen overnight.
And so it was really this sense of we got to get started now because it’s going to take a while for us to get what we need to get done. So we jumped right in, started with some initial projects around some problems that we needed to solve, things like even just hand hygiene monitoring, assisting our remote sitter program with technology that could help them identify falls, leveraging algorithms, working with remote nursing opportunities, looking at our ORs and optimization. And as we started this work, I, at the same time, was involved in CHIME leadership and HIMSS leadership as well, to an extent had another of opportunities to speak on podcasts and national platforms and just found that I couldn’t help myself from starting to tell this story. Even though it was just at the beginning, I just thought, everybody needs to know that this kind of technology is really finally here.
And when our physicians look at us and our nurses look at us quizzically like, “Really? Another technology? And you’re sure it’s going to help me because I don’t know?” I felt with utter confidence, the answer is yes, this is going to help. And so the CEO, Andrew, and I started some conversations. And he said, “Gosh, you seem pretty excited about this work.” And I said, “Well, I think it’s the future.” And he said, “Well, great. How about a future here at Artisight, where you can bring your knowledge and experience both as a physician, as a leader in an organization and a health IT leader, and help us grow and expand and be the best that we can be as a company.” And I think his last words to me after I signed my offer letter were, “Okay, let’s go fix healthcare.” So that’s what we’re on a journey to do.
John Farkas:
No small mandate. That’s awesome.
How Hurricane Ike Led Stephanie to a Career in Medical Informatics
John Farkas:
So several rewinds I’d like to take here, and a few bus stops I’d like to make. So starting your journey as a clinician, you were your doctor. You said hospitalist, right?
Stephanie Lahr:
Yep.
John Farkas:
So do you remember the moment that was kind of the transition, or what got you interested in jumping into the CMIO role? Because that’s a big move and a very different focus. Worth saying, chief medical information officers are almost always, if not always, physicians, right?
Stephanie Lahr:
Almost always. Yep.
John Farkas:
Yeah. And so what was that moment? What got you to look at that role? And what was the mandate that you saw there that got you interested?
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah. Well, maybe a quick rewind further than that. It’s kind of where the passion around this area came from. I trained in Galveston, Texas, is where I was doing my internal medicine residency. And I don’t know if I’ve told you this story before, but we had a hurricane in 2008, Hurricane Ike, and I had five feet of water in my own house.
John Farkas:
Wow.
Stephanie Lahr:
The university system basically closed for many months because the infrastructure of the entire island was gone. There was no power, there was no running water, nothing. But we had obviously thousands of patients that were also going through an extreme time, and displaced and needed guidance. And so we had been in the fortunate position of going through actually an EPIC implementation just a couple of years before that, which was pretty early in that whole timeframe, because this is like 2005, 2006.
But the great thing was, because we were electronic at that point, two weeks after the storm, maybe even a little less, I was asked to go to… Because I was almost done with my residency, so I was pretty well equipped to go ahead and start handling and treating patients on my own with minimal supervision. And so I was given an office, I don’t even think it had any windows, and a computer and a fax machine and a telephone. And they said, “Patients are going to call. There’s messages in the system. We need to help them.” And I had everything I needed. I could see all of their hospitalization records, all of their clinic records, all of their prescriptions. I could resend prescriptions to new places. I could send records to clinics or hospitals where they maybe were receiving care because they couldn’t receive it from us. And it was really, really powerful because I knew and had been a part of the health system when we were on paper, and all of those records were literally soggy and underwater…
John Farkas:
Wow.
Stephanie Lahr:
… 20 miles away. And we would never have been able to provide the support to the community that we needed to do during that time of crisis for them, but also for us, if we didn’t have that platform. And so that was a moment for me where I was like, okay, this is the way the world is going. We have to do this, and we have to do it as well as we can. So when I went into private practice, honestly, it kind of just happened organically. I was very interested in helping be a part, again, of the solution. I met with the CEO of the health system. I remember during my interview, I said, “Hey, do you use an EHR? And can I be kind of a part of what your work is in that space?” And he looked at me like, “Wait, rewind. You’re a doctor who was interested in using an EHR and wants help?”
John Farkas:
“I’ve never seen that before.”
Stephanie Lahr:
“I’ve never seen this before.” And again, it was pretty early. In fact, this was the time when organizations like AMDIS, the American Medical Director for Information Systems organization was alive and well. But CMIO wasn’t even a term. It was medical directors of information systems, right?
John Farkas:
And CMIO is a relatively recent, relatively recent position, right? And if I’m understanding right, if I were to characterize this role, it’s essentially the nexus within a hospital or provider organization that bridges the gap between practicing clinicians and the IT department. Is that a fair characterization?
Stephanie Lahr:
It’s the translator. Absolutely. And what happened for me, yep, I was dealing with my own partners, and then the leadership team of IT said, “How about go talk to the ER doctors? Could you go talk to the ICU docs? Hey, the physical therapists are struggling with something. Maybe you could help them too.” And we had nurse informaticists already in the organization. And so it really just became this symbiosis with me as kind of the leader of then that informatics team to, again, take what were the needs of the operational teams and translate them into what we could and couldn’t do with technology. Because sometimes being a CMIO means saying no. It’s not always about saying yes, but it’s figuring out how to turn that no into something that can still be impactful and positive. And so you really had to know and learn the technology side as well, and then translate the two across to each other.
Bridging the Gap Between Clinicians and IT
John Farkas:
Did you find yourself… In that role, were you most often going from clinicians up or IT down? And I put that in a unfortunate hierarchy because it doesn’t need to be up or down, but you know what I mean. Which direction were you most frequently advocating in?
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah, I was most frequently advocating to the technical teams, what the clinicians needed. And the other thing was actually bringing together, even from different clinical areas, how to do a synergistic approach. So as an example, pharmacy may have felt they needed one thing, but it had an impact on physicians that they didn’t want, and maybe an impact on nursing that they didn’t want. And so it wasn’t even always just translating to IT, what the needs were of the teams, but it was sometimes interrelation communication between clinicians to say, “I understand that pharmacy really needs this. Is there a way that we can do that that doesn’t cause this secondary issue for the physicians?” And prior to that, there was nobody doing that work, and so you ended up in situations where actually, typically what happened is you blamed the technology. “Well, if this stupid system could just do it like this, it would be fine.”
And then we dig in and say, “Oh. Huh. As a matter of fact, it can.” How did we arrive at this decision? Oh, we arrived at this decision because we asked one group how it needed to work. Because it was the pharmacy module, so we asked pharmacists. Well, the pharmacy module lives inside an ecosystem of a whole bunch of other things. And so that was, actually a lot of the work was bringing multi-disciplines of even clinicians together and figuring out uniformly, what did we need as a group so that could be translated to IT? Because IT can do a lot of things, but they can’t code it two ways, one way for pharmacy and one way for physicians. That’s why we went to platforms, was to eliminate that. So that was a lot of those conversations.
Why CMIOs Are Impactful Strategic Leaders
John Farkas:
And so you’re really in that role of… You said translation layer, which I think is a really good, but also just a very active problem solver, just working very hard to say, okay, we’ve got this capability, this piece of technology, this piece of infrastructure that is a little bit of a square peg. We got to sand off some of these edges to make sure it slots in here the way the clinicians need it and will fit their workflow, will fit the way they want to do their jobs. It’s never going to be a perfect match, but it’s your job, in that sense, to make it the best match it can be.
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah. The other thing I think was really amazing about the CMIO role and most of the CMIOs that I meet, CMIOs and the other informaticists on the technology teams or in organizations tend to know more about how the organization works at its deepest level than anyone else.
John Farkas:
Almost anybody else. Yeah.
Stephanie Lahr:
Because our tools will never work if it doesn’t tie in well to what the workflows are. And if you tell us this is your workflow, and then we go and build the system to do it. And really, that’s not actually how you do it. You just didn’t maybe want to say, “Well, in real life every day, we do it like this.” So then we’d go in when things were broken and figure out, well, what’s really going on here? And then we’d unravel the layers of, so actually, you don’t do it like that 80% of the time. And so a lot of it too, was creating first a safe environment to say, “Don’t tell me what I want to hear. You guys are clinicians. Do you want a patient to tell you what you want to hear or do you want a patient to tell you the truth? We’re in the same place. We want to build tools that work for you, but I have to know your real work in order to do that.”
And so it was an amazing place to be, and also made a CMIO a really great strategic leader for an organization at large. Because when an organization is looking at strategic vision and goals that they have to accomplish, the CMIO can tell you a lot of the deep dark secrets you may not know that are going to have to be worked through in order to make those kinds of transformational changes. It can be a challenging place to be too, because it means where most of the frustrations and challenges are, and that’s kind of the space that you live in. But knowing that you’re chipping away at those and helping to set a new vision and hoping that you also then execute on that is where the fun comes.
John Farkas:
And so if you’re bringing a product to market that has a strong tie to the clinician, that solves a real problem that they’re facing, but maybe it has a pretty steep curve to get it integrated or adopted in the system, the CMIO is going to be a good place for you to start your process because they’re going to know the anatomy of what it’s going to take to connect the dots…
Stephanie Lahr:
Absolutely.
John Farkas:
.. or if it will even make sense and fit. Because at the end of the day, they have a very integral knowledge of… They don’t just know the clinical side of it, but they know the spectrum of what it’s going to take to make it actually happen and make sense.
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah, absolutely. And organizations that are lucky enough to be of size where they have a CNIO, or a Chief Nursing Information Officer, same kind of thing, right? There’s a whole… Informatics in nursing has been probably in place longer than even on the physician side. And so again, really strong advocates and people that you want to work through, not only… Yes, if you’re trying to sell something, they’re a great person to get that advocacy from. But actually beyond that, advisory, right? I think there’s a lot of companies that would benefit from having, and it doesn’t have to be anything massive, but an advisory kind of group that helps make sure that where they’re going is aligned with the problems they think they’re trying to solve. And CMIOs and CNIOs are fabulous at that because they sit at that intersection all the time, and they can give you objective feedback.
John Farkas:
Yeah. They know actually, actually what’s happening, which is really important.
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah. And they have administrative time to probably be able to dedicate to that, right? Asking a practicing physician, “Can you be on an advisory board for a surgical tool?” Honestly, probably not. They’re just too busy taking care of patients, and we want them to do that. CMIOs and CNIOs are in an administrative role, and it does give them that opportunity.
Stephanie’s Experience Transitioning from CMIO to CIO
John Farkas:
Gotcha. Okay. That is some great perspective. So you made what I think is the unusual bridge from CMIO to CIO because there are far fewer physicians in the CIO role, from my experience. Talk about what that looked like for you and what it meant to cross that bridge practically.
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah. I think, well, first of all, it is a small but mighty, and I think growing group of people. And I think it’s happening…
John Farkas:
And appropriately so, I think, right?
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah. I was going to say I don’t think it’s happening by accident.
John Farkas:
Yeah, it makes sense. It’s a hospital after all.
Stephanie Lahr:
Exactly. It’s the reason we’re now seeing CEOs of health systems be physicians as well, and probably not surprising then to put the CIO not that far behind it, depending on the role of the CIO. And that’s unique, chief digital officers, chief healthcare information officers. There’s different ways to structure this. But having a physician sort of at the helm of providing the strategic visioning leadership and back to the rest of the senior leadership team, the partnership on kind of how to drive the ship makes a ton of sense, because the reality is medicine is becoming more and more dependent on technology every day, and so ensuring that alignment is there is going to be essential. This is not just a commodity anymore. IT is not just a ticket taker shop, nor are the clinicians people that we’re just going to force technology onto. There has to be that unification of the two to make sure that we’re all solving the right problems. So for me…
John Farkas:
And just to level set, so you’re moving from the bridge, the bridge between the hospital and the IT department to the IT department. So the CIO, if I were to characterize that position, they’re overseeing the selection and implementation, optimization of anything information technology related. So they’re the ones that are making that piece happen, and they’re typically reporting to, I’m guessing most often reporting to the CEO in that situation. Is that true?
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah. This is evolutionary as well. But as we see, the CIO, or whatever letter you’re going to put in there, become more of a strategic part of the team, I think it is definitely more and more common. I reported to the CEO, and I think a lot of my colleagues are in that space. So yes, as far as the decision making, obviously we tried to make that more of a governance related opportunity, but the reality was all of the coordination, and then making sure that the right resources at the right time were deployed to make sure all of those things happened was my responsibility. I had several hundred people reporting to me. I had tens of millions of dollars in budget that was my responsibility, and a strategic vision to help set alongside my other leaders to make sure that the foundations that we were going to set in tech technology were going to get us to where we needed to go, but that we were, at the same time, being visionary and forward thinking, because we know that technology was moving so fast, that we had to be thinking several years out.
So it was a growth experience for me. I certainly had never had… Nobody in medical school teaches you how to manage a 30 or 40 or 50 or 150 million budget. Nobody teaches you exactly what it means to be a visionary leader. In fact, some of medical school is the antithesis of that, right? The doctor is the tip of a different kind of team. And while team-based care has become much more common, and I think was a great element, for me as a hospitalist coming into this, that’s different than leading large teams and providing vision without micromanaging. We as doctors can tend to be micromanages because…
John Farkas:
That’s [inaudible 00:26:12]
Stephanie Lahr:
… the life of a person is at risk. And so being able to take a step back and allow other leaders to grow, to cultivate other leaders was a different area that I had to go out and really do some purposeful work in figuring out, how do I know myself? What are my shortcomings? And how do I grow in these areas to be a better leader?
John Farkas:
Yeah. So when you moved from that position, which I would say is certainly on the clinical side of the spectrum from the CMIO, into the CIO, which goes far more into the business and transformation side of the spectrum, how would you characterize the primary mind shift or change you had to make in your… Or what maybe caught you by surprise, or what move did you have to make to inhabit that space?
Stephanie Lahr:
I, as a physician, had to realize that attorneys are my friends, which is…
John Farkas:
That’s a big shift.
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah, it was. Really, I remember the first couple of meetings as the CIO that I had with our attorneys, I was as nervous… You would’ve thought that I was personally being investigated for something, even though it was never anything to do with that. But just the physician in me kept thinking malpractice and all those kinds of things. So it took some time.
John Farkas:
Danger, danger, danger.
Stephanie Lahr:
Yes, exactly. Danger ahead. It took some time. And actually, by the time I left the organization, I would say the legal team were probably some of my closest partners. And even at Artisight, I find myself saying, “I just want to run this past our attorneys.” So that was probably a big part. The FFO relationship, also a major element that I needed to cultivate and understand, because the reality was I was now the person who had to make sure that we had the money to do the things we needed and wanted to do, and how to translate that, and how to justify that and create the ROI on that, which meant I needed [inaudible 00:28:16]
John Farkas:
And from an infrastructure standpoint, you had one of the biggest budgets on the spectrum.
Stephanie Lahr:
Absolutely. Right. Which brought a lot of attention as well.
John Farkas:
Sure.
Stephanie Lahr:
So I needed to learn about budgets. For me, I was like, capital and operating, why do we have a difference? It seems weird. Let’s just have one bucket of money. Why does it have to be like this? Right? So these were things that I had to learn why they are the way they are. Sometimes you don’t need to ask necessarily why all the way to the deepest levels, but this is how it is, and just you’re going to have to work around it. But understanding that, and then again, creating that partnership with the CFO so that I could understand from their perspective what the challenges were and figure out how to bring those things together. So those were unique relationships that I had to foster that really were not on my radar at all as a CMIO.
The Do’s and Don’t’s of Pitching to a CIO
John Farkas:
So one of the things that I am aware of as we look at this particular position, is that if I look at… Coming at it from a I’m a health tech company, I’m trying to find my way into a hospital system, I would venture to guess that maybe other than the CEO, the CIO has the biggest hedge of protection around them, because, oh my gosh, I think every… If you walk the floor at HIMSS, I think everybody in that space has, on their list of ideal targets, the CIO is pretty much on there. And if not the primary, certainly a secondary, which means that you’re not giving anybody your real email. You’re not giving… So talk about that. If somebody is trying to get an idea across, how are you taking in information? How are you people engaging with you?
Stephanie Lahr:
You’re definitely right. I got hundreds of emails a day. In fact, even still…
John Farkas:
Let’s just pause for a second. Hundreds of emails a day.
Stephanie Lahr:
A day.
John Farkas:
So let’s just… So what is possible about… It’s not possible to.
Stephanie Lahr:
It’s not. So honestly, mostly what that meant was don’t bother. If you’re sending an email that’s some sort of quick pitch of what your product is. The likelihood that I was going to look at it was almost zero. Every once in a while…. Typically what I would do in the morning, because a lot of them came in right through everybody’s CRMs, they all send them out at sometime in the morning, and so…
John Farkas:
Tuesdays, Tuesdays at 8:30.
Stephanie Lahr:
Yes, exactly. So in the morning I would kind of get up, and over coffee, I’d hit edit on my phone. And I’d just start swiping down, and I would select literally everything. And I’d quickly kind of glance at what the title was, but if it wasn’t a person I recognized and something that didn’t really stand out, it was mostly just a massive delete. Once in a while, something would stand out. People ask me all the time, “What is that something?” I’ll be honest, it was random. I almost think it was divine intervention. Every once in a while, for some reason, I’d stop on something. And I’d open it and oftentimes be like, huh, I actually might be interested in this, and then I’d push it out to my team or whatever. But email in general, terrible. A couple of things I say, while we’re on the topic of not working, it was very frustrating.
People get very aggressive about this, right? It’s a little paparazziesque, right? There’s the cool nature of, yes, we know you’re trying to sell something and you need access to me, but then there’s the crossing the line into not appropriate. People who just put calendar invites on your calendar as though they’ve sent you whatever, super annoying. CRM messages. In general, I can see that from a mile away. At a minimum. I love it… In fact, I have a colleague who has a company, and it literally says in the body of his message, “This message is generated by my CRM, but I hear I need to send out a mass communication, and so I’m just letting you know that this is where it’s from.” I could tell by… Even how it was titled to me, I could often tell what was generating it.
So those are not good things to do. I will say though, that I felt… So we talk about the wall. It took a couple of years. I felt like I was a wall a lot, and I put blocks up and I said, “Look, I’ll come find you when I’m ready.” I realized that that was not a good approach because there was so much out there and so much changing. I was putting a huge bias on what I could potentially bring into the organization because it was only through my own lens that I was willing to talk to somebody. So I actually started participating in some of, and this was during the pandemic when they were virtual, some of these virtual kinds of conferences. They’re pay to play kind of the 30 minute speed dating. That’s one of the things I really love about the ViVE Conference is that structure that they have. I think are great.
John Farkas:
You’re talking about the hosted buyer [inaudible 00:33:32]?
Stephanie Lahr:
Hosted buyer program, or reverse expo, or whatever different people call it. But it’s basically somewhere between five and 30 minutes of time where you just meet and hear about things. And the value of that is, even though there were a number of times that that was not a tool set that I needed at the moment, sometimes I filed it away for later because I thought, I think this is on our path just not right now. Or there were other times that made me say, I don’t even know if I’ve thought about that yet. And then I’d go back to my team and say, “Have we thought…” And then I’d go to colleagues across the nation, and I’d say, “Are you guys thinking about this yet?” And sometimes they’d say, “Yeah, we are.” And I’m like, “Gosh, I didn’t even realize that was coming at us. I need to start digging in and understanding.”
So I do think those kinds of programs provide value, but it’s hard because the volume is so high that you have to cut things off somewhere. So I do like those kinds of programs. A lot of it is colleague kinds of conversations as well, getting together with colleagues, both physically and virtually, and saying, “What are you using for this? Do you like this? What would you do differently?” That kind of stuff. But it’s a hard place to be as on the vendor side, which I now am recognizing and seeing from a different viewpoint.
John Farkas:
You are. You’re on the other side. Yeah, it is. So one of the things I hear very frequently from our clients, from others in the industry is, “We have great success when we get the opportunity to have a conversation.” And it’s that second part of that clause, it’s the secondary clause there, when we get the opportunity to have the conversation, that is so pivotal, right? Because how do you get that? How is that possible? I think it ends up being a big part of marketing’s challenge to compel that conversation to happen. How do you get people to the point where they want to have that conversation? And that’s not an easy thing, especially when you’re looking at somebody like a CIO. And so talk a little bit about how, when you are in that realm… So certainly, I hear the speed dating, the hosted buyer frameworks, those forums that afford organizations to get in and at least help somebody into how to think about the problem differently, because that’s part of it, right?
You’re a CIO. You’re in the middle of a storm. You’re not able to keep tabs on every new thing that’s coming out, or new approach to things that might be applicable. And so having somebody opportunity to tell you this story, it’s what you guys are facing right now in Artisight. How do we think about this problem, and how are we going to help the industry understand what’s different and special about our solution? So I hear the hosted buyer things. What else? What other kinds of things can organizations do that might have a shot at getting through? What are some of the things that you’ve experienced in the past?
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah, I think… Well, and maybe this is… Hopefully this isn’t super secret sauce I’m giving away from my own organization, but I came to an organization that already had clinical and healthcare people as a part of it. I think that is valuable in multiple ways. So the fact that we had physicians and nurses and operational leaders from health systems, that we have that at Artisight gives us a couple of opportunities. One, it means we’ve got networks of people that we know from that side, from being on the operational side, and so we can reach into those networks. Two, it allows you to maybe take a role more as a thought leader and providing guidance to the greater community, as opposed to selling a solution. And so if you can have the people on your team that are in a position to be knowledgeable and have the expertise to really help the community at large understand, to your point, the things that we’re trying to solve and the new ways to do it, you may have an opportunity to present yourselves in different forums than you would otherwise.
And the other thing that happens when you have people who are coming from operations into your companies is you’re probably better targeted. Your solution is probably better targeted to the problem because you have inside knowledge as to what that problem is, and then are much more likely to be able to solve it.
Utilizing Empathetic Authority to Solve Problems
John Farkas:
Yeah. That makes great sense. I call it empathetic authority. I think as an organization, it’s hard, because what I see is there’s a lot of tech companies that are chasing an opportunity, right? They’re coming to it. Somewhere in an accelerator they were involved in, they realized that this part of healthcare needed something, and they saw some dollar signs associated with it, and they worked to put together a solution. That’s kind of a gross way to put it, but it’s actually not uncommon. And so they’ll get enough expertise to work to solve the problem, and a big chunk of what they’re missing is the opportunity to clearly connect the dots. And that does require a lot of domain expertise and the ability… That’s one of the things I’m excited about and how Artisight is approaching it. We’re selling into the clinical environment, and we’ve got clinical leaders who’ve been there, done that, leading the charge. And I think that that ends up really not just transforming the approach to the market, but it transforms the approach to the solution.
You’re solving the problem in a way that makes sense because you’ve sat on that bridge.
Stephanie Lahr:
And I think the empathy side of what you mentioned as well really resonates with me because I have been, and I’ve said this… Even now in the role that I’m in and in different partnership agreements that we’re working on to grow as a company, I have said to people, “I sat in a boardroom and I pitched, as the CIO, the solution that I wanted to bring to the organization that we had brought through governance and those kinds of things that we felt was going to take us forward.” And I was successful at it most of the time, but every time I got the yes, someone else got a no. And sometimes that, no was, “We’re not buying new hospital beds.”
The new nurse call system is going to have to wait while we do whatever this other thing is that I was leading, every dollar that a health system spends is extremely important to me. And the value that they are getting for that dollar is extremely important to me. And the concept and the idea of people taking advantage of the opportunity of, here’s a problem that needs to be solved, I can make a buck, healthcare can’t afford that.
John Farkas:
Especially now.
Stephanie Lahr:
Especially now, but really never. Margins at health systems have never been margins to be admired. And so they’re doing a service for the community, for all of us. And so totally understand, even for a health system, no money, no mission, right? There has to be some back and forth exchange there. But foundationally, I can read that in my conversations with people. And if the conversation with you is really about sell, sell, sell, I’m done. Because what it really needs to be about is solve, solve, solve.
John Farkas:
And value, value, value, right?
Stephanie Lahr:
And value, value, value.
Prioritizing Solving over Selling
John Farkas:
Yeah. And that’s what I’m hearing really clearly. If I’m getting what… So if you’re a company coming to market and you’re wanting to make, from an empathetic perspective, you better have your value equation very well articulated and ready to, documented, articulated, and well constructed. Because if it’s sketchy or thin, as the CIO, you’re saying no to somebody to say yes to this solution, and it better be a really clear reason why. Because if it’s not, I’m going to go with the clear reason because I’m working with thin margins and it is too critical. We’re talking about how we are advancing the cause. That makes sense. And something I see really, it’s especially hard for early stage companies who haven’t been able to get all the way through the equations and don’t have the proof text all the way worked out.
But what I’m hearing is if you’re going to invest some time, effort, energy on anything, it’s to make sure that you’ve got a fine point on what those equations look like. It’s well researched, well documented, and something you can give, turn over to somebody and say, “Look, here’s the real numbers.” Is that…
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah. And if you’re still in that development phase, be willing to go into development relationships, right? Figure out how you’re going to do your financing. One other thing that’s amazing right now is because of all this attention in this space, again, a little more challenging today, but still possible, there’s tons of venture and private equity capital out there for companies, to get them… That’s what the whole point of that is, to get them through these early stages of development so that they can remain a company, but figure out what they really need to do. And so partner. Be honest with the health system and say, “Here’s where we are today. Here’s where we think we need to go. The reality is we need an ecosystem like yours to help us vet this out.” And do that a few times. Don’t sell it if it’s not ready to be sold. Find a way to build it together.
And again, easier said than done. Something has to keep the money of the company going. But I think those are times that you need to think about looking at financing opportunities and those kinds of partnership agreements so that you can take the time to go out and really make sure that your tool meets the needs, because nothing is worse on either side of this than tearing something out later.
Systematic Issues That CMIOs and CIOs Face
John Farkas:
Yep, absolutely. So as we kind of round third and head for home here, if you were to kind of thumbnail some of the big problems up in the grill of some of the, I guess of an average, let’s start on the CMIO realm, what are some of the things you’re aware of systemically that are broadly facing that position as problems? And then the same question for the CIO, but what are you seeing as some of the meta issues that are really there?
Stephanie Lahr:
Yeah. On the CMIO, I think there’s probably two buckets I’d put it in. One is the, again, the burnout. How do they help the clinicians use tools that will really be helpful? How do we improve workflows, and yet do it in a way that can be somewhat flexible? Because we know that not every physician wants to practice in exactly the same way or needs the same thing, and not every nurse is going to do the exact same thing, so how do we help find those tools that can improve those workflows? And then the other thing I would say is probably on the decision support and the harnessing of all of the data that’s out there, as well as the quality of the data.
So back to the sort of burnout side of things. One of the reasons we see a lot of burnout is because of the administrative tasks. So I think CMIOs are looking at ways, and CNIOs are looking at ways of protecting their clinical people from the one more click, right? Don’t bring me a solution that is going to create great data, maybe maybe not, but requires one more click. Because one more click literally could be the difference between a nurse quitting her job or his job today or not.
John Farkas:
Yeah, because you’re already…
Stephanie Lahr:
And so how do you balance that/
John Farkas:
… several clicks. So adding one more is not a problem solve.
Stephanie Lahr:
Correct. And then the other thing on the data side is there’s so much to know. There’s so much to assimilate on an everyday basis, putting in front of us that… And things can happen almost silently if it’s happening in front of your eyes, right? So how do we use the data to create triggers, to create decision support, to create reminders, to create communication flow, so that as all of this data is coming in, we can actually do something with it? Because the human mind, in and of itself, is not going to be capable of digesting and using all of that information in real time. So how do we start to use it in ways where we can bring it to the right person at the right time for the right patient? And that means then also getting to this point of almost precision based care, right? What is the exact right blood pressure medicine for this patient…
John Farkas:
This patient, yeah.
Stephanie Lahr:
… who lives in this place, who has this history, who all of those kinds of things? So there’s tons of opportunity there. It’s going to take us a while to get there, but we’re not going to get there without, again, starting somewhere and marching our way toward it. And I think that our clinicians are really attuned, and CMIOs are really attuned to how do we improve that. On the CIO side, I think it’s thinking about the broader efficiencies of the organization at large. How do we help revenue cycle teams be efficient? How do we help even our IT teams be more efficient? How do we help the clinicians be more efficient? How do we bring the right data to our leaders so that they can make the best realtime decisions? How do we create new data that we’ve never had an opportunity to see before to be able to figure out directionally, is this clinic moving in the right direction or not?
And what changes might need to be made? At the hospital level, are the ORs as efficient as they need to be, or are they not? It’s going to be data that’s necessary for that, and process changes that are going to be needed. And I think the CIO is looking at that globally, not just from the clinical side, but again, all of the rest of the areas across the organization, because we’re seeing shortages in all of those areas. We don’t have enough people anywhere to do the amount of work that’s necessary. I will say there’s a great book called Upstream. It’s a healthcare specific book, and it talks about thinking upstream. I think this is a great book for anybody in our industry to read on which side of the aisle you’re sitting on. It talks about moving from solving the problem that’s sitting right in front of us to solving the upstream problem.
It starts with that old story about there’s kids in a river. And somebody’s walking by the river, and they see this kid in the river and they go and rescue him. Oh, good. We rescued the child. That happens four or five times. They pull five kids out of the water. And the one person that’s helping to do the rescue, the two people that are there, he takes off and heads up the river. And the other person says, “Where are you going?” “I’m going to figure out who’s throwing all these kids in the river and fix that problem.” Right? We spend a lot of time focused myopically on the problem that’s happening right now, and I’m seeing this even more today. Because as the financial pressures of the organizations are constraining down, we have this propensity to look much more directionally at just what’s happening right now, and how do I fix it. We’ve got to take a vision toward what’s going to happen in the future and look upstream and figure out, what’s the root of this problem, and how do we really solve it?
Closing Thoughts
John Farkas:
That is a great place to land the conversation, because really, that’s what we’re facing right now. We have to look at what are the systemic level solutions that are going to lead to real transformation at the end of the day?
Stephanie Lahr:
Absolutely.
John Farkas:
Because we can’t keep it going the way it is. We need some fundamental different ways of doing things, and we need leaders who have the courage to not just put out fires, but to look at the things that are going to be truly transformational and change the way it’s done. Because the system has to move, and we all know it. We all wrangle it every day.
Stephanie Lahr:
But what an amazing opportunity we all have to participate in that, and to potentially, if we’re successful, be able to look back in a handful of years and say, “I helped make that happen.”
John Farkas:
Yeah, it’s true. The good news is, from my perspective, I’m starting to see solutions emerge, I’d say Artisight is one of them, that truly have an opportunity to lead to in enormous, fundamentally good transformational change at the level it needs to happen to preserve the system. And that, to me, is encouraging. It’s been a while. I feel like the clouds are starting to part a little bit, and we’re starting to see, okay, how technology can really make a difference, instead of just adding complexity, which has been so true of so much of the stuff that’s happened in the last decade. We’re at the point now where some things are starting to cut through. And it’s an exciting moment, and I’m looking forward to how that manifests. And Stephanie, I’m grateful to you, not just for joining us here, but for the part in the conversation that you’re being in that. I think your perspective and what I’ve seen in our time interacting and getting to know you, you’re about that kind of change.
And we need more folks like you who have the courage to say, “Okay, here it is. And if we aren’t going to jump in and make this happen, bad things are happening. And if we do jump in and make it happen, good things are going to result.” So that’s why I’m excited about what you are on the trajectory to do now, and really grateful for the opportunity to have this conversation. So if you haven’t already, check out artisight.com, A-R-T-I-S-I-G-H-T.com, see what they’re doing. It is really remarkable technology that they’re bringing forward to change how clinicians are able to focus more of their energy at giving legitimate important care at the top of their license for the people that are in midst of episodes of care. I’m really excited to see what they’re having the opportunity to do. Again, Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us here today on our humble little podcast.
Stephanie Lahr:
Absolutely. Happy to do it. Great to see you.
About Stephanie Lahr
Dr. Stephanie Lahr is the President of Artisight Inc, an innovative platform solution with the goal of bringing the joy back to medicine and reducing friction using automation and AI. Prior to Artisight, Dr. Lahr served for 6.5 years as the CIO and CMIO of Monument Health.
She is an experienced informaticist and leader in the healthcare industry, and has served on several boards and committees including CHIME, the Epic Community Connect Steering Board, in which she was the previous Chair, the South Dakota state HIE board, AMDIS, and the United Way of the Black Hills. Dr. Lahr was a HIMSS 2021 Changemaker in Healthcare Award recipient. She is also an advocate and mentor for women in HealthIT and has shared her experience and advice on several podcasts and educational sessions.
She holds a Medical Degree from the University of Texas Medical Branch, completed an internship in Obstetrics and Gynecology and Internal Medicine residency, is Board Certified in Internal Medicine and Clinical Informatics, and has completed the CHIME CIO Bootcamp and is a certified CHCIO.