TECHNOLOGY COMPASSIONATE HEALTHCARE

We talk to Baptist Health Arkansas’s dynamic CIO, Michael Elley, about cloudenabled IT transformation and the future of clinical practice through ML

With a full century of history behind it, Baptist Health has shown that its founding principles are enduring ones. A faithbased healthcare system – as implied by its name – it has expanded from a single hospital to eleven, serving Arkansas' population of more than 4 million while increasing care coverage into eastern Oklahoma.

Innovative leadership has helped Baptist Health to grow, becoming not only the first healthcare system in Arkansas, but the first to attempt open heart surgery, the first to perform a heart transplant, and the first to utilise robotic surgery. In all, the Baptist Health system now has 250 'points of access', comprising specialty clinics, urgent care centres and a care home for the elderly, in addition to its hospitals.

Having a firmly embedded Christian ethos, the organisation’s enduring principles lift it beyond the definition of a business to that of a healing ministry.

Just like any modern hospital group, Baptist Health seeks to attract and retain the best-qualified clinical and administrative staff while onboarding the most effective treatments and IT practices available; inevitably, its basic ethos tends to attract like-minded individuals. So much so that, in practice, its retention rates and the proportion of long-serving staff is well in advance of industry norms.

In a nutshell, Baptist Health exists to provide quality, patient-centred services, to promote and protect the voluntary, not-for-profit healthcare system, to provide top-notch health education, and to respond to the changing health needs of Arkansas’ residents with both Christian compassion and personal concern.

The CIO's task of modernisation

As well as growing in size, Baptist Health has continued to keep up with best practice, both administrative and medical – over the last three decades, of course, this has meant adopting successive iterations of technology.

The more recent journey has been the responsibility of CIO Michael Elley, who joined the company nearly five years ago. He brought with him 15 years of experience in senior positions – most of them based in the healthcare sector – and now heads up a leadership team of 14 with some 270 technical people across the wider organisation.

“These teams manage all of our Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and ERP, through to our technology stack, cybersecurity and all the other technological platforms and applications we all depend on these days. And, of course, we also work closely with the leadership team and wider colleagues, including the nurses and clinicians at our facilities.”

According to Elley, one thing he loves about his job as CIO is this wide variety –he's much more than just a technology leader. “We have a role in everything we do including oncology, cardiology, surgery, and everything non-clinical as well. And as all health providers must, we have to have to meet these patients, our consumers, wherever they are, whether that is in our clinical settings, virtually, or in their homes.

“We're shifting how we do medical care! That's important in a faith-based organisation. We attract a lot of like-minded, service-minded individuals.” And Baptist Health refuses to operate in isolation, seeing the benefits of collaboration; instead, it works with other healthcare systems in the state to help them provide a higher level of care. Among the advanced services in which they are deemed outstanding are virtual care, primary care, and critical care.

Elley found plenty to do upon his arrival in 2018. The bulk of the workforce is long-serving, which is excellent for consistency but can make for a resistance to change. “I did find them hungry to drive improvement and change..

“Early on, I placed an emphasis on cybersecurity, something we have made great strides in. Our data analytics were a little further behind, too – in other words, how we leveraged data to drive decisionmaking and strategy. Now, we have more structure in place and have been able to interject it into executive leadership strategy discussions and directions.”

These priorities come out of Elley’s personality and experience, he believes. Cybersecurity, though previously understood, wasn’t as top-of-mind as it is today.. It is now hardwired across the organisation – a considerable achievement in just five years, particularly when two of those spanned a global pandemic.

MICHAEL ELLEY

TITLE: CIO

COMPANY: BAPTIST HEALTH

INDUSTRY: HEALTHCARE

LOCATION: ARKANSAS, US

Michael Elley is the Chief Information Officer for Baptist Health in Arkansas. He has over 20 years of IT experience and has spent 17 years in the Healthcare IT sector, the last 12 in an executive role. Michael has worked for organisations such as Ohio Health, BJC HealthCare, Lahey Health, and Cox Health. Michael enjoys spending time and travelling with his family and has been married to his wife Angela for 21 years. He is active in physical fitness and his daughters athletic endeavours.