Q&A with Englewood Health CIO Inderpal Kohli: “Only 20 Percent of It Is About Tools.”

CIOs and other leaders face a harsh reality. Because of the highly sought-after technical skills they’ve attained, most of the IT team can find a job in any industry – one that offers more money, in many cases.

So, what’s keeping these talented workers from seeking (potentially) greener pastures? That’s where leadership comes in, said Inderpal Kohli, VP and CIO at Englewood Health. “If they choose to work in healthcare IT, my primary goal is to connect them with the mission of the organization,” and to ensure they understand “what’s at the end of the service or a tool I’m providing.” The more people understand about how technology impacts care delivery, the more invested they become in driving those technologies forward.

During an interview with Kate Gamble, Managing Editor at healthsystemCIO, Kohli talked about the work his team is doing to advance digital transformation across the organization by focusing on specific uses cases and outcomes. He also discussed the key foundational components in enabling digital health – including a solid infrastructure and alignment with operations; his “passion” for improving IT service management; why he believes the emphasis should be on growing individuals and not necessarily leaders; and what he has gained by teaching.

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Bold Statements

Because we are on a single platform, that lends itself to supporting integrated care across multiple disciplines. The infrastructure is there. The technology is there. We just need to ensure that operations are aligned with IT.

The challenge with digital transformation is that the key constituent is not your internal user group, it’s the patient. We don’t know their workflows; we don’t know how they will interact with the system. And so, we’ve had to rethink this process.

It is excitement with caution about what the responses will be. We, as a sponsor group, educated ourselves and are planning to pilot it. If it’s successful, we’ll ramp it up.

This isn’t about tools. In fact, only 20 percent of it is about tools. More and more, it’s about people, process, and methodology, and that’s where I’m focused.

It’s not just about growing leaders; it’s about growing everyone where they are. It’s growing my entire team, right? Everyone undergoes growth. And it’s not always just about titles; it’s about learning. It’s about knowing more than you did before, and it’s about able to do more.

Q&A with Inderpal Kohli, VP and CIO, Englewood Health

Gamble:  Hi Inder, thank you for your time, we really appreciate it. I know this time of the year is busy, but it’s always busy, right?

Kohli:  It’s always busy.

 

Gamble:  To start, can you provide a high-level overview of Englewood Health — what you have in terms of bed size, where you’re located, things like that.

Kohli:  Englewood Health is a prominent health system in Northern New Jersey covering five counties both within New Jersey and New York. Our primary facility is a 300-bed hospital complemented by an extensive outpatient network which includes physician practices, hospital outpatient departments, imaging, therapeutic services, and more. We have a team of about 1,200 medical staff members advancing the mission of patient care. We offer both primary and specialty care services. Our vast physician network includes specialties such as cardiology, GI, orthopedics, and neurosurgery. Within the health system we have cardiology, cancer care, orthopedics as some of the significant service lines. We see about 2 million outpatient visits every year.

 

Establishing a unified platform

In terms of where I get involved, all of us are tied to the mission of patient care. But one of the key pillars of our success lies within our technology infrastructure and our single electronic medical record, which is Epic. And so, all 150 of our locations are on a unified platform of the Epic EMR on a single network across the enterprise. It gives us a seamless patient view and a seamless physician or clinician experience at any of our sites, enabling users to access and interact with the health system.

 

Gamble:  How long has there been a unified platform in place?

Kohli:  We’ve been live on Epic for about five years now. A few years ago, we initiated the process of creating a single unified network infrastructure.

 

Digital transformation

Gamble:  And of course, that set the foundation for a lot of what happens in IT. What do you consider to be your team’s key objectives at this point?

Kohli:  In 2022, the organization initiated a formal digital transformation strategy, which we began executing in 2023. As with any successful digital strategy, operational alignment was certainly a key focus. Once that was established, we started adding tools and technology on top of that.

In 2024, our core objectives are around advancing our digital transformation initiatives, both with enhancing patient experience and clinician efficiency, leveraging all the tools and processes that we’ve worked on in the past few years. One of those initiatives is the digital front door — a user-friendly portal to serve as a primary entry point for current or future patients that can streamline access to services information, enhance self-serve capabilities, and enable more clinically integrated care. Because we are on a single platform, that lends itself to supporting integrated care across multiple disciplines. The infrastructure is there. The technology is there. We just need to ensure that operations are aligned with IT. And of course, we’ll eventually add more tools and technologies to enhance it.

Tech-enabled care

Another pillar of our digital transformation is to enhance our technology-enabled care, which happens when the patient is not within our four walls — or at least, the figurative four walls, because we have 150 locations. We’re extending technology capabilities to support patient care in terms of the settings of remote patient monitoring for chronic care management.

2023 was a banner year for all things AI. All of the conversations were around AI, and we were nimble enough to update our digital transformation strategy to be able to implement and utilize AI tools and solutions for patient experience as well as clinician efficiency.

Self-learning agents

One area we’re exploring is an omnichannel virtual agent which is really an AI-based self-learning agent that can offer information to patients and help drive self-serve capabilities across all channels. It’s that motive, again, of offering an omnichannel, seamless experience, no matter how you chose to reach us — phone call, SMS, or the portal. We’re looking for efficiencies to improve the physician-physician patient interaction inside the exam room by adding tools to help optimize the clinical charting process, giving clinicians more face time with the patient, and helping them complete the chart in a timely manner.

Inbox management

We’re trying to help our physicians with the burden of inbox management. As part of that, we’re exploring an Epic function that uses generative AI to auto-draft responses to patient queries for clinicians. It’s available to us now to pilot and expand, which is exciting. Of course, humans will always be in the loop, but using large language models to generate draft responses will help to ease that administrative burden on clinicians.

Looking ahead

As we move further down the road and more products become available, there’s more we can do. We’re interested in clinical summaries, which offer an efficient way of quickly going through all of the pertinent portions of the chart, either before the visit or during a handoff. Behind the scenes it also does denials management, which is another area we’ll continue to explore with AI.

And of course, Epic and AI is just one portion of my job. Cybersecurity is front in center in everyone’s mind, and so, we continue to enhance our program with advancements in risk and compliance as well as biomedical device security. We’re also looking at infrastructure resilience, disaster recovery, and IT service management. One of my focus areas has been on enhancing the quality and timeliness of the service we provide to our constituents: physicians, clinicians, and all users across the organization.

 

Operational alignment

Gamble:  So, you definitely have a lot going on. I’d like to talk more about the digital transformation strategy — how are you able to keep that focus on operational alignment?

Kohli:  Everyone who has been doing this has learned that clinical technology solution needs to be weaved into a clinician’s workflow; we’ve perfected that art with the EMR implementations.  We need to understand the workflow, then redesign it, and then lay technology on top.

The challenge with digital transformation is that the key constituent is not your internal user group, it’s the patient. We don’t know their workflows; we don’t know how they will interact with the system. And so, we’ve had to rethink this process from the lens of a consumer who’s coming from the outside. We all want to offer a seamless digital experience where with a few clicks or text messages, patients can avail themselves of our services. We need the operations to align with the experience so that if the patient completes the intake process beforehand, they can enjoy a seamless, fast check-in process and get to see their provider directly, rather than, being handed a clipboard or o answer questions.

That’s just a simple example of why operational alignment is important. On a more complex level, we’re asking consumers to provide more input and more data so that we can offer self-service capabilities. But it’s not humanly possible for our staff to sift through all that data. This is where we need to realign some of our operational workflow processes, and then add technology and tools on top of that. That, I think, is where most of the work happens.

 

Excitement with caution

Gamble:  Right. So, it’s been a very deliberate approach to move toward digital transformation. What has been your strategy in deciding which AI capabilities to try out?

Kohli:  It’s kind of like a later. At the beginning of 2023, we were all tuned into all things AI in healthcare. At Englewood, our strategy has been to look first at current vendors; if it’s aligned with our objectives, we can look at third parties. Generative draft response was a no-brainer, because it’s offered through Epic. We had been working on some inbox management initiatives with clinicians for a very long time. Those are slightly different; they’re more about automation. When draft response became available from Epic, we were definitely one of the first organizations to jump on it. And so, we learned about it and shared that information with our clinicians.

There’s a definite excitement. It is excitement with caution about what the responses will be. We, as a sponsor group, educated ourselves and are planning to pilot it. If it’s successful, we’ll ramp it up.

 

Gamble:  That’s an important approach to take, particularly when there’s so much hype around ChatGPT.

Kohli:  Absolutely. In technology, we’ve been using AI for a very long time. We’ve been using it with so many other tools. It’s really generative AI that has all the buzz around it, and rightfully so — there’s finally there’s that promise of being able to communicate with computers as if they were humans. And so, I absolutely understand the buzz. But we definitely want to respond in a responsible manner that realizes benefits for both of clinicians and patients.

 

Gamble:  I’m sure that can be very challenging to make sure this is being done responsibly while also managing expectations. What are your thoughts there?

Interpal:  You’re right about managing expectations. I think that whether or not we brought these tools to our clinicians and users, they would still get bombarded with offers to help solve this problem or help solve clinical efficiency using AI. They were already being bombarded.

And so yes, managing expectations is very important. We are absolutely approaching it in a very methodical and controlled manner. We wouldn’t want any of our clinicians to ever utilize a tool that is not part of the core enterprise technology set. We’re trying to get ahead in the process by tackling use cases that are closely aligned with our strategy and have a better value for our clinicians. And so, we’re really trying to get ahead by investigating, by bringing in pilots, and by including them in that decision-making as to whether to roll it out enterprise-wide. Thankfully, all the tools we’re using offer the opportunity to pilot without a long-term commitment.

 

Use case and outcomes-driven

Gamble:  That’s such a big part of it. Looking ahead, what are some of the other ways in which you hope to use AI tools? What’s the approach you’re using to prioritize?

Kohli:  We’re using a targeted approach around omnichannel virtual agents, ambient charting, and draft response that is aligned with our digital strategy today. Fortunately, we were nimble enough to adjust our digital strategy to include AI functionality. We’re a very use case and outcomes-driven organization, and rightfully so. In a time of scarce resources, you want to prioritize your resources to where there’s more value. And value could be a lot of things; it could be better patient care, a better clinician experience, or new business or along those lines. There are opportunities to explore technology, whether it’s cybersecurity or continued evolution of AI tools, and that’s where we want to utilize it. Not just for infrastructure resilience, but also handoff and clinical summaries and denials management. If we’re successful with our pilots, we’ll likely be rolling those out throughout the organization. But in general, I’d rather have my teams focus on a few targeted things and achieve those outcomes rather than starting too many things in parallel.

 

Improving user experience

Gamble:  That’s really important. You also mentioned being focused on IT services management. Can you talk about what you’re doing there?

Kohli:  Yes. This is something I’m very passionate about. I’ve been working diligently for the last year and a half on improving our IT services management in terms of the internal user experience. Some of it actually involves the patient experience side as well. As you can imagine, for an organization with 150 locations and a user population which is not contained within the four walls of one building, this is a constant challenge. It helps having a process and a methodology, and having everyone adhere to that.

So, I’ve been incorporating ITIL principles into everything we do in terms of service management which includes responsiveness to users and closely monitoring the data. This isn’t about tools. In fact, only 20 percent of it is about tools. More and more, it’s about people, process, and methodology, and that’s where I’m focused. I brought in someone dedicated in this role to work with our service desk vendor (which is an outsourced vendor) and work with our team and our users to improve the overall experience.

 

Process and methodology

Gamble:  That’s so important, especially considering the resource challenges that healthcare organizations have been facing in recent years.

Kohli:  Absolutely. We all have resource challenges, but I didn’t approach it as a resource issue. I think I approached it more as a process and methodology issue first. Let’s review the data, and if the data suggest that resource is an issue, then we have those discussions. But so far, that has not been the case. It’s not a technology issue; it’s an issue of streamlining process and methodology.

We’re a healthcare organization. We’re still a very high touch organization and I want to maintain that and ensure that we do offer that level of service to our clinicians.

 

Connecting IT to the mission

Gamble:  The most important resource, of course, is people. As a leader, what are you doing to ensure you’re growing future leaders or at least helping people to develop further?

Kohli:  I would add more flavor to it. It’s not just about growing leaders; it’s about growing everyone where they are. It’s growing my entire team, right? Everyone undergoes growth. And it’s not always just about titles; it’s about learning. It’s about knowing more than you did before, and it’s about able to do more.

I’ve been in healthcare IT for over two decades. This is honestly the only industry I know like the back of my hand, but that’s not the case with everyone. A lot of my team can technically work in any industry they choose. If they choose to work in healthcare IT, my primary goal is to connect them with the mission of the organization, because I do believe it takes a special kind of person to work in healthcare. They need to experience it themselves. They need to be connected to the mission. They need to understand what’s at the end of the service or a tool I’m providing.

Almost all of the time, the patient is at the end of it, and that’s a very personal thing. All of us have experienced being a patient or having a loved one being a patient—that personal experience is what they need to get motivated to do this job. To be very honest, some of them can go to another industry and have a relatively easier job. But if they connect with the mission of the organization, they stay here. We’ve had a lot of people stay. I am blessed to have a team that is very engaged. It’s not a team I brought in; it’s mostly the team I inherited, but I’m proud and thankful to call them my own.

 

Rowing in the same direction

Gamble:  What are some things CIOs and other leaders can do to make sure their teams are tied to the mission?

Kohli:  I wish I could say I have a three-bullet strategy for it, but I don’t. There are, however, a few things. One is to keeping bringing in the mission and explaining the why. It’s not just giving people work to do; we need to tell them why they need to do it. I think that ‘why’ is so important. Oftentimes the ‘why’ is helping a clinician taking care of patient.

The other way I can connect my team more with mission is by making sure projects, efforts, and initiatives are weaved into the overall strategy so that we are all rowing in the same direction. This way, I’m not solely responsible for explaining what a clinical program will bring because there’s a strategic priority that has very clearly defined goals and outcomes. I need to bring that back to my team so that they understand why this project or initiative is important and what are the outcomes.

 

Gamble:  Right. And as you said, there’s not a three-bullet strategy that’s going to work for every organization.

Kohli:  Absolutely. And the fact is, some people will choose to stay, and some won’t, and that’s fine. That’s okay. This isn’t for everyone. My goal, of course, is for everyone to connect with the mission while you’re a member of our team.

 

Learning by teaching

Gamble:  The last thing I want to talk about is your teaching experience [as an adjunct faculty member at Weill Cornell Medical College]. I’m sure it was beneficial for your students to learn from your experience, but I would imagine it benefited you as well.

Kohli:  It’s a very rewarding experience. I did that for about 10 years, and I’m anxious to get back into it. Interestingly, it didn’t start with me looking for a teaching opportunity; it started when Cornell was initiating a healthcare informatics certificate program. I became connected with a group of like-minded people, and we developed a curriculum. I then started giving some guest lectures and helping with projects, and that became a full master’s program. I stayed on with that program for about a decade.

For me, I think the driving force was to give back and teach others about how healthcare works in a provider organization, and how technology works. And it is refreshing. It keeps me on my toes in terms of being on the cutting edge. But more importantly, for those of us who are doing this day-in, day-out, it allows us to step back and consolidate learning into a format so that others can understand it, and so that inherent knowledge we have developed can be verbalized in a manner which others can consume.

 

Gamble:  Sure. As you said, getting that different perspective always helps.

Kohli:  Absolutely.

 

Gamble:  Great. Well, I’d like to thank you so much for taking the time to speak. I’d definitely like to do this again and talk about some of the other areas you’re involved in like cybersecurity.

Kohli:  I’d be happy to. Thank you.