Best Hospital IT: #3 Super Hospital
Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford, California
IT Staff: 210
Overall Score: 60.57%

Lucile Packard Children's Hospital and Stanford Children's Health CIO Ed Kopetsky said that the opportunity to work with household-name companies like Apple and Epic, plus the grand visions such as precision medicine initiatives, are among the most appealing projects to its IT professionals.

"Two years ago we grew as an enterprise through the implementation of Epic," he said. "We had been a very high-end, high-acuity children's hospital. And as healthcare reform changed the marketplace, we acquired 40 sites of physicians throughout Northern California." We had to evolve to offer the full-continuum of care.

But even with all the challenges of rolling out a major EMR implementation, that entailed – the academic medical center was still able to notch some impressive wins along the way.

Within a year of go-live, for instance, "one of our physician fellows here worked with Apple and Epic to develop GluVue, a tool to continuously monitor blood sugar levels regardless of the patient’s location," said Kopetsky. "This technology replaces four to five needle sticks a day and data is sent every five minutes to our EMR and doctors," he explained. "You can see patterns of glucose levels and we can actually intervene."

That sort of game-changer can only come with help from a staff always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to leverage technology to improve patient care.

"When I came here seven years ago, one of the key things I did within the first week was to go on clinical rounds with our CMIO, where I discovered areas of opportunities to leverage technology," said Kopetsky.

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"So we changed our name to 'Information Services' to highlight our service driven culture," he said. "We're here, technology is a tool, but the issue is patient lives. And everything has to be good for that. The technology strategy evolves from that. We need to be 100 percent reliable. We need to be predictive. We need to prevent."

Kopetsky said virtual care and analytics initiatives being launched across the organization these days "point us to the future – that's the next wave."

Part of that innovation is coming from the EHR itself. "Right now, it's a repository," he said. "But we're already moving it with decision support tools – with the Epic tools we can do cohorts on the fly with our 10 years of historical data. So we're using is it in a decision support way, and in a continuous monitoring way."

Other forward strides are even more advanced.

"On the precision medicine side, we're right in the middle of it," said Kopetsky. " We have some of the world's leaders in cell and gene therapy and together with genomics and analytics, we are advancing predictive medicine.”

Kopetsky highlights that the IS department is integral to working towards next-generation medicine and innovation, which attracts some of the best IS staff.

"And we're gonna keep going," he said. "It's just great what we're doing in partnership with our clinicians, and you can never do this without the greatest people."

Workplace culture was one of 87 questions senior executives (CIO, CMIOs, etc.), directors of IT, clinical and systems analysts, technicians, help desk staff and others responded to on our survey.

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