“We’re Trying to Deliver a Better Experience”: Stuart James on CHRISTUS Health’s Data Journey

In the last few years, it has become clear that artificial intelligence offers tremendous opportunities to increase efficiency and improve the experience for patients and providers.

But, as healthcare leaders are learning, the AI journey is only as good as the data and processes behind it, according to Stuart James, Chief Operations Officer and Deputy CIO at CHRISTUS Health. “If you automate a bad process, you just get better at being bad. We’ve got to make sure our data is on point and that our processes are mature enough for us to really benefit from AI.”

Recently, James spoke with healthsystemCIO about the critical role that data stewardship and data governance play in enabling organizations to take advantage of digital tools. He also talked about the benefits of having a “deliberate” approach to AI adoption, and the changes happening at CHRISTUS.

CHRISTUS’ journey

It may seem a bit unusual to hold the titles of both COO and Deputy CIO, but to James, it’s a perfect marriage. “They complement each other quite well. The COO role is about overseeing the service delivery of the IT organization and ensuring we align with the business and deliver value,” he said. “That’s a big part of my role.”

And in fact, having data and analytics, applications, and integration also under his purview has been integral during CHRISTUS’ three-year plan to move to a single EHR platform, which kicked off in 2022. By March of 2025, the organization plans to have all sites — including more than 60 hospitals and 600 care delivery centers — on Epic, creating “one source of truth for accessible, reliable, and personal care delivery.”

But as resource-intensive as an initiative like that might be, it’s not the only priority for James and his teams — particularly as CHRISTUS continues to experience significant growth. “The world doesn’t stop,” he noted. “We’re growing by acquisition, and part of our role is to support that growth.”

Deliberate approach to AI

This is where AI can play a key role — but only if approached deliberately. “We don’t want to become a hammer looking for a nail,” said James. “AI technologies have been in our industry for decades going back to Natural Language Processing, but in the age of GenAI, it has taken on a new focus,” he added. As such, “We’re making sure we’re leveraging AI for automation and documentation where appropriate, but a lot of the benefit of AI is unlocking the vast amounts of data that we have to make better decisions faster.”

Part of the strategy, he pointed out, is recognizing that the technology has evolved significantly over the years, and must be managed differently. “We can’t do things the way we did just a few years ago, and definitely not the way we did 30 or 40 years ago,” James said.

Now, it’s about building “collective intelligence” that can enable clinicians to work at the top of their licenses, while also resulting in increased efficiencies in everything from call centers and appointment scheduling to operational and clinical decision making. “The real sweet spot with GenAI is the conversational interface it provides,” he noted. “We’re trying to deliver a better experience for our providers, consumers and patients.”

Data stewardship

However, before organizations can fully reap the benefits of AI, there’s a critical piece that needs to be in place: data stewardship.

“Before you embark on a journey, you have to understand that your AI journey is only as good as your data. It’s only as good as your processes,” James said. Therefore, it’s vital to make sure data are accurate and processes are mature. “If we have fragmented or dirty data, and if we don’t have good data stewardship, it’s going to be very difficult to have an effective AI program.”

The key, he said, is ensuring teams have the right people with the right skill sets and tool sets, and educating them so that they understand the downstream consequences of failing to capture data accurately (for example, during the registration process). It’s also making sure people understand how doing things like documenting in real-time in the OR can drive utilization. “In my mind, it’s all about creating a culture where everyone understands that what they do on a daily basis impacts our key decision-making,” noted James.

Another important aspect is maintaining a single source of truth, particularly with multiple systems working together. For instance, if an individual discovers during the registration process that a piece of information — such as a physician’s zip code — is incorrect, it can be fixed during the registration process, but the source of truth is the credentialing system. And so, “either we fix it in the credentialing system and have it flow forward, or we have a process in which we fix it on the fly in the registration system, but now I need a feedback loop to update the credentialing system so that the source of truth is accurate,” said James. “That’s an example of data stewardship.”

Data governance

Not to be neglected is the importance of data governance, which goes beyond having strong data scientists on board. “We need the administrative and logistics components where we have the right people in the right room to make decisions and understand the various rules and regulations for retention,” he said. “We need risk people. We need all of those things as part of our data governance. But at the end of the day, it comes back to mindset and culture. Because you can have governance and rules, but if nobody understands them or follows them, you’re not going to get to where you need to be.”

It’s particularly crucial in an organization as large and complex as CHRISTUS, “where you have thousands of people making decisions and taking millions of actions that impact your data,” James added. “That’s the hard part.”

What can help ease the burden is spreading it out, he noted. “It’s not, here are the 20 people in the organization who are going to make sure we have good data. It’s like security; it’s everyone’s responsibility.”

One way to create that is through education and transparency. “I always tell people, ‘Here’s what’s at stake when something goes wrong. If we’re lucky, it causes a problem immediately. If we’re not, we find out a year down the road that we’ve been making bad decisions or that we missed something,’” noted James, adding that data problems can linger and go undetected for long periods of time.

Therefore, “it’s really important that we have people who understand the consequences of the things they do on a daily basis,” he concluded. “It has to be part of the culture.”