Five Questions With: Phil Kahn

As chief information officer for Care New England Health System, Phil Kahn oversees the network’s information technology department.

He discusses immediate demands placed on the department by the COVID-19 crisis, and what steps were taken to enable much of the health system to shift to virtual operations.

PBN: What sort of challenges did the COVID-19 pandemic bring to your role as chief information officer and the IT department as a whole? 

KAHN: There were a lot of competing priorities, including: modifying our electronic medical record systems to provide proper visit types, patient locations, coding and billing components; providing sufficient network access capacity to allow over 1,000 non-clinical users; providing sufficient remote equipment for our staff and especially our special areas like our IT Help Desk and Patient Access Center; provisions for our field surge hospital, including phone and internet service and workstation and portable computing equipment, including printing and labels; providing telehealth video capacity for our medical group and hospital physicians for patient visits and medical consultations; keeping our IT staff safe and productive while working remotely.

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PBN: How did you address the sudden need for doctors and other providers to communicate with many patients remotely? 

KAHN: We chose a HIPAA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996]-compliant approach, even though the federal government waived this compliance for the duration of the pandemic. We’re currently utilizing Zoom Health as our standard, while we work aggressively toward a permanent solution that will be integrated with our Epic Ambulatory Electronic Medical Record. To “stand up” these capabilities within a few weeks of the pandemic, we leveraged existing, new and personal equipment.

PBN: What was your involvement with the field hospital at the former Citizens Bank building in Cranston? 

KAHN: We are active members on the command structure, providing phone and internet connectivity, workstation and mobile equipment, tracking boards and all the accompanying modifications to our hospital electronic medical record system from registration through billing, including pharmacy drug administration. Now, we continue to be on stand-by for active support, should the field hospital be activated.

PBN: Did the pandemic force you to think about some aspects of communication in new ways? Do you foresee any of the new frameworks your department put in place becoming permanent? 

KAHN: We have begun reviewing “lessons learned” so that we can provide remote or work-from-home capability for the duration of the pandemic and beyond. This includes network access, equipment standards and virtual meeting capabilities. Our response to the pandemic has added a new dimension to our disaster planning. Heretofore we’d focused more on physical disasters, rather than global or regional health disasters.

PBN: Were you able to figure out any way to help isolated COVID-19 patients stay in touch with their families while they were hospitalized? 

KAHN: We are deploying over 150 mobile devices, including Apple iPads, Kindle Fires and other tablet devices to allow contact between our quarantined patients and their families and friends. This has been especially important for our maternity, neonatal intensive care unit and end-of-life situations. We also used this mobile technology to conserve personal protective equipment during the early phases of this pandemic.

Elizabeth Graham is a PBN staff writer. She can be reached at Graham@PBN.com.