Exploring the Technical Impacts of COVID-19 with Cedars-Sinai CIO, Darren Dworkin

Cedars-Sinai is a nonprofit academic healthcare organization that
serves the diverse Los Angeles community through more than 40
locations, 4,500 physicians and nurses, and 1,500 research
projects in motion. Darren Dworkin has been Chief Information
Officer at Cedars-Sinai since 2006, where he also founded the
Cedars-Sinai Accelerator and serves as managing partner of
Cedars-Sinai Health Ventures.

In this episode of Healthcare is Hard, Darren talks to Keith
Figlioli about the impact of COVID-19 through a technical lens,
offers advice to innovators and entrepreneurs selling to health
systems during this difficult time, and shares broad views into
the digital transformation of healthcare. Some of the topics they
discuss include:



Enabling Remote Work Through COVID. Many healthcare
workers have been bravely carrying out their roles within the
hospital setting during the pandemic. But the fact that a large
portion of healthcare workers have been asked to work remotely
– just like in other industries – hasn’t gotten much attention.
Darren points out that in only four days, Cedars-Sinai shifted
from having 400 people working remotely to having well over
4,000. He talks about how the health system’s technical
infrastructure scaled to handle the demand.


Lasting Impacts. One of the silver linings Darren sees
emerging from the pandemic is how it will advance strategies
around helping patients interact with technology in the right
ways. While Cedars-Sinai had already been relying on technology
for urgent care and primary care visits, he uses the example of
post-surgical follow-up as one area where telehealth has, and
will likely continue to be very beneficial. As he points out,
surgeons prefer to operate, so if they can minimize the time
they spend on follow-ups, it’s a win all around.


Pulling Versus Pushing Technology. Darren recognizes
that his role as CIO is to “help engage end users in the tech
that we have.” In other words, push technology on the
enterprise. But part of the reason he finds the work of the
Cedars-Sinai Accelerator so rewarding is that it’s exactly the
opposite. Clinical and operational leaders get to choose which
companies should be in the accelerator based on their needs and
the solutions that will solve their biggest challenges. As an
academic medical center, Darren sees innovation and discovery
as core to the overall mission at Cedars-Sinai, and its
accelerator is a big part of that.


Advice for Entrepreneurs. Darren’s biggest advice for
digital health entrepreneurs is to focus on real savings. Just
as we’re approaching a day of reckoning for tech IPOs where
companies planned to layer on growth without profitability, the
environment for digital health startups is similar: adding
improvement without adding bottom line ROI may no longer be
sufficient. For example, as companies think about expanding
their product, Darren suggests thinking about how to broaden
into an adjacent space – versus simply of adding more “bells
and whistles” – in order to help health systems eliminate
vendors and streamline costs and administration.



To hear Darren and Keith talk about these topics and more, listen
to this episode of Healthcare is Hard: A Podcast for
Insiders.