| | JULY 202019CIOReviewThe unprecedented level of change and unpredictability that we are experiencing within the healthcare industry shows no signs of slowing down. One of the key challenges for healthcare CIOs is understanding and meeting the needs of consumers by leveraging new technologies while continuing to protect patient and provider data. A core element of many strategies is the use of technology to help consumers navigate the complex healthcare ecosystem, ensuring the care providers have the right information at the right time to make the best choices for the patient health. To complicate matters, many healthcare companies have large-scale transactional systems that have been maintained for decades to support incremental new business requirements. This combination of a dynamically changing industry environment and inflexible IT platforms is driving the need for a fundamental transformation.A Multi-Dimensional TransformationGiven the scale of the challenge, CIOs need to transform along multiple dimensions. They must create tighter alignment among business and IT teams, deliver new capabilities faster by increasing the velocity of delivery through agile methods, and new tools and processes, modernize technology platforms, enhance cybersecurity capabilities, and finally and most importantly, cultivate the kind of talent that can make this a reality.NAVIGATING TECHNOLOGY TRANSFORMATIONS FOR CIO SUCCESS By Steve Betts, CIO, Health Care Service CorporationThe Importance of IT and Business Aligned Teams: IT Must `Be the Business'With the healthcare landscape shifting so quickly, it is essential to matrix IT employees across key business functions. This enables the IT team to "Be the Business" by removing silos and creating a collaborative environment in which teams can work together on solutions. Doing this allows IT employees to understand business priorities, jointly develop strategy, and partner with business colleagues to deliver solutions with support from enterprise IT functions. Delivering New Capabilities FasterWe also need to deliver new capabilities to the market more quickly. At Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC) we have moved to a tri-modal development approach, which incorporates "optimized" waterfall, scrum and extreme programming. This enables us to match the development approach with nature of the capabilities needed. For example, we have implemented extreme programming for our consumer-facing applications, which helps consumers manage their healthcare in one place. They can find providers, make appointments and view recent claim data with just a few taps. Our teams have moved from four big releases per year to a continuous delivery and integration ability, which is crucial to responding in a rapidly changing market. This dynamic delivery model enables the team to take direct feedback from our consumers and reprioritize our work based on the most urgent needs, pushing releases to multiple times per day if necessary.CIO INSIGHTS
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