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As part of its Coronavirus Prep series, This Week in Health IT speaks to CIOs & CMIOs to discuss what they are doing and can be doing to prepare for COVID-19 in their communities. Special thanks to series sponsor and Galen partner, Sirius Healthcare.

In our own blog series, we will be providing our top takeaways from those conversations with the intent of spreading best practices among Health IT and healthcare delivery organizations to prepare for the anticipated surge in demand for care due to COVID-19.

Next up is Dr. Lee Milligan, Senior VP & Chief Information Officer, Asante Health

Top Takeaways:

• Evaluate the financial implication on putting a project on hold for a period of time. Nothing is actually being stopped altogether, but may be paused.
• Examine the impact to a reduction in staffing. Sit down with whoever is responsible for overarching prioritization and have them create a list of top 10 things they care about if you are 50% staffed.
• Identify hot spots if a reduction in staffing occurs. If a director, who has 70 reports, have 7 people out, and all 7 of those people are integration-focused, that is a problem.
• Put out regular communication to your team. As a CIO, I put out a twice a week email to my staff of 300 to communicate what the projects are, and what the pieces are we’re putting in place internally to help address this.
• Build a COVID-specific visual task board built into ServiceNow (or equilvanent solution) that helps track whats been requested, whats been in execution, and whats been completed.
• Communicate to leadership and management that this is not business as usual. They will not be held to the same standard of completing a random request as they may have been two months ago. So, for example, you’re no longer required to build that smart text for Dr. Jones who needs this out in one clinic by the coast.

Full Interview:

This Week in Health IT is also collecting resources and links designed to help health systems respond to and inform their communities around the Coronavirus. Visit their COVID-19 Resources for Health Systems page.