Message from leadership: Dan Howard
Dan Howard, M.B.A., is chief information officer and assistant vice president for medical affairs at USA Health.
During the past several years, USA Health has grown significantly. To better support the expanding clinical and business needs, we have continued our investments in technology, infrastructure, and information systems.
The implementation of Cerner as the electronic health record system for USA Health was a sea change and a massive undertaking. As with any project of this size, there were bumps and bruises along the way. Thanks to each of you, we are beginning to come out the other side.
On Sept. 16, we are scheduled to roll out the first significant update since our initial implementation in October 2017. This update will provide USA Health with the needed software foundation to support our various clinical application initiatives.
This upgrade will have minor cosmetic changes for the end users visually, while the majority of changes will be on the backend process and workflows needed for added functionality.
The upgrade will deliver:
- Significant improvement in our ability to directly deliver biomedical device data into Cerner, eliminating repetitive efforts and increasing accuracy.
- Enhanced information exchange across platforms and facilities.
- Increased population health management tools and analytics.
- Enhanced care management tools that make provider use more efficient (less clicks!).
- Enhanced back-office functions to optimize financial workflows.
A second significant project that we are beginning to roll out is our IS Touch Project. The project is scheduled for completion in mid-2020 and has multiple goals including:
- Standardizing the IS environment to ensure a common user experience across all platforms, devices, and locations.
- Increasing security of end-user devices to help prevent security breaches or mitigate their effects should they occur.
- Enable security updates to be pushed to end-users.
- Provide greater speed and improved functionality allowing a user to have the same desktop experience no matter where they log into a computer.
We will be providing more information on each of these projects through USA Health Insider.
Dan Howard, M.B.A., is chief information officer and assistant vice president for medical affairs.
