Q&A with Myra Davis of Texas Children's Hospital: ‘Innovation is everyone’s responsibility’

In 2019, you added “innovation” to your title of chief information officer. Before that, you served as vice president of information services. How did the additional innovation piece get added to your responsibilities?

It was really not “Myra’s thinking” whatsoever. It was just the thinking and brilliance of our CEO and president, Mark Wallace. Along with his executive team, he recognized and appreciated how we have leveraged not only the functionality of our electronic medical record, but (its) integration into other solutions, and the advancement … the organization (has made) when it comes to leveraging data. It was really his intuition that birthed the additional “I” in my title.

At the onset of that introduction of my title, it was really important for me to work with the organization to define what innovation means in our organization. At the end of that exercise, it was very apparent that innovation is everyone’s responsibility. Just because I had the word in my title did not mean I was the only person to think innovatively in our organization. The other part of it is that, at the root of the word innovation, it means, really, to change. For me, it became a matter of: How do I partner with our executive team to ensure that we are leveraging technology to change operating practices, to change and enhance how we care for our patients, and to change how we care for our workforce?

I love the way you defined innovation as change, whether it’s with regard to clinical care, the workforce or something else. What teams do you lead at Texas Children’s as part of that work?

I have an innovation team. Their role is to partner with the organization—because innovation is everyone’s responsibility—on: What are the opportunities we have? What problems are others at the organization trying to solve? And, more importantly, do we have the assets in our portfolio to solve those problems?

They are also looking at possibilities to partner with outside companies to create products, or even enhance existing products, leveraging Texas Children’s data. We have a rich data source, and we know that it’s attractive to many startups or existing companies.

They also work internally with the rest of the technical teams so that (the innovation team is) abreast of upcoming advancements in technologies that we own, and to explore what opportunities they could solve.

In addition, they partner closely with our executives and clinical leaders through an innovation advisory group. We meet periodically to understand what opportunities we have. It’s one team, but it’s one team that works with many existing teams.

How do you go about recruiting staff for the innovation team? What kind of skill sets are you looking for?

They don’t need a technical background. They need more of an inquisitive-nature background—the ability to ask questions, influence and really work from the lens of a startup. Not everything is defined. We’re looking to them to go out and just seek opportunities and not be afraid to meet people. So, a lot of courage. We have some really talented individuals on that team who are skilled at doing that. They’ve been great partners to the rest of the information services team, as well as the organization.

You mentioned that the innovation team will also work with others in the health system to figure out what their pain points are and what problems they’re working on. How does that process work?

A really good example, recently—and we’re still in the exploration phase of it—is we were aware that our pathology department was looking at some opportunities to explore digital pathology. The innovation team went out and talked to the pathology department about what the opportunities looked like, and then we partnered with a third-party cloud solution vendor.

Because they’re not technical, the team is not going to be inclined to try to (develop a) solution. They’re really inclined to try to solve the problem that they’re hearing about, by marrying the opportunity to the technology solutions that exist.

We’ve also been leveraging robotic processing automation. The technology has been around for quite some time, but looking at opportunities to create efficiencies and operating models afforded us a chance to partner with our clinical and operational leaders and introduce the technology in partnership with opportunities they may have. It affords us a chance to introduce some technology solutions and think through how we could create changes, whether it’s in practice visits or in operating models, and create some efficiencies. Again, the technology has been out there, but introducing it in partnership with operational practices has afforded us an opportunity to create change.

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You’ve talked about partnering with third parties and outside startups. What does the vetting process for that look like, especially if you’re sharing patient data?

We actually have an onboarding process. So, before we engage directly with any vendor, we work very closely with our information security, legal and contracting departments. Those are three key critical partners for us to ensure that we are protecting our information. That’s some pretty significant due diligence that we take before exploring any partnerships externally.

What support do innovation-focused executives like yourself need from the CEO and other C-level executives to really be able to pursue innovation projects?

Let’s not just isolate that word “innovation.” There’s a lot of smart people in many organizations, and everyone’s innovative, because they’re all thinking about: How do I make a change in my organization? How do I make a change leveraging certain technologies? You as a leader—whether you’re a CIO or not a CIO—you’re trying to drive certain degrees of change. Marrying your opportunities to the potential technical solutions that your organization may or may not have is really what I would encourage everyone to consider as a path to take.