Agile development, once the domain of software developers, is being put to work at Intermountain Healthcare, as CIO Marc Probst and his team are rapidly building programs throughout clinical settings.

“We are rolling it out and configuring it within the entire organization,” Probst said. “We’re applying it not just to software development but as an integration within the organization.”

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The agile method -- in which requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing teams -- promises to deliver programs much more quickly and better meet the needs of healthcare providers.

Probst and Jeff Townsend, executive vice president at Cerner, have been collaborating on just such an approach. And the two will present in a session on March 2 at HIMSS16 titled “What IT Takes to Succeed.”

“With traditional IT approaches, you make a selection for a piece of software – for example a departmental imaging system – and you hand it to IT to implement,” Townsend said. “In the agile model, we start not as software-centric but as workflow-centric. We include process judgements, with short cycle times and we initiate prototypes and empower leaders to participate. So there is a continuous ‘show me’ element.” 

Cerner, Intermountain and 400 Intermountain physicians collaborated in 2015 to apply agile development principles to design and configure an electronic health record, practice management and revenue cycle system at two Intermountain hospitals and 24 clinics across northern Utah. Teams used agile development principles to design and configure the system in six-week cycles.

Probst and Townsend will outline how to recognize challenges of agile development and how to overcome them. They will also show how to identify the tools needed to implement data-driven, agile cultures within other parts of the organization.

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Townsend said the new agile development approach is changing how organizations operate. 

“This isn’t the CIO picking the system out,” he explained. “It’s the clinical and business leadership putting it into the organization – which is incredibly more powerful.”

Their session, “What IT Takes to Succeed,” is scheduled for March 2 from 1 – 2 p.m. in the Sands Expo Convention Center Sands Showroom.

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