Becky Sykes, SVP, Resource Manager and CIO at Mercy Health

Do you see any trade-off between innovation and standardization? Can you give me an example?  

"I think innovation should be done with the base tools. I can’t have staff off working in disparate systems, with data that can’t be brought back into the electronic record – that creates a support issue. So we do innovation within the confines of the system we already have. There are plenty of good products out there that work with Epic, because the medical records of fifty-three percent of the covered lives in the country are on Epic. Mercy Health has hired a Chief Innovation Officer out of the Brandery to the Business Development Team, but he works with my IT Team to curate and vet new products. We do let markets pilot – when they find some shiny new toy at a conference, for instance – we pilot it and if it really is a differentiator, we will roll it out across the entire system."