Author: CHRISTOPHER J LEONARD, DO, MHI

I am a strategic physician executive who is innately and highly creative. I contributed to addressing a great need for process evolution to overcome the inherent logistic barriers that inhibited scalability and growth. At that time, technology was rapidly increasing its more visible role in modernizing the healthcare system. Although the post-acute space was not included in many mandated incentivized federal programs, it became clear that the niche of wound care within this space was simply a microcosm of the greater healthcare landscape. Subsequently, the same health information technology and medical informatics approaches should be homed, carefully tailored, and applied to the need for integration, care quality and cost containment. Recognizing the challenge of leading this endeavor, I simultaneously earned a master’s degree in healthcare informatics with a thesis in AI and this afforded me the intellectual satisfaction of formalizing knowledge in this domain while putting a wide range of skill sets to use on the front lines of healthcare delivery. 

The rapid transformation occurring in healthcare was particularly difficult to navigate in general and in many ways, more so within the long-term care space, which required continuously improving skills in process improvement and change management.  In this niche and practice environment the majority of innovative initiatives and their successful execution were unprecedented. As the teams and departments with the required technical skill sets expanded and crystallized, a dedicated CTO was on-boarded in order for me to assume a role as a CIO charged with leveragind data assets for knowledge discovery and to drive meaningful outcomes data. This second phase of my tenure leveraged many initial and newly realized innovations, solutions, and applications in synergy. With a now more robust ecosystem, this included the digital transformation of all departments, defragmentation and synergy of teams, and continued growth of the core business along with several new verticals. 

Procurement of structured data resulted in the continuous accumulation of high-quality information that could now support sophisticated business intelligence reporting, data insights and machine learning mediated predictive modeling. My ultimate professional goal was legitimizing the company as the niche thought leader and the establishment of the delivery model as authoritatively evidence-based, data-driven, and academically rigorous. 

My career trajectory was both stimulating and rewarding, but I began to feel limited by the narrow scope of the care delivery model and yearned to apply my transportable skills to a broader ecosystem within the healthcare sector. I developed an approach, which could be called an actionable system of assessing, analyzing, prioritizing & determining how to address problems, challenges and/or create new products/solutions in novel ways and wanted to be challenged by a more vast system that required more complex restructuring as part of the ongoing revolutionizing of dated systems and processes for larger groups of stakeholders where the solution was more impactful. It also became clear to me that the artistic & creative skills I thought I’d abandoned were actually contributing in full force in a an amalgamation with clinical knowledge, experience, understanding and appreciation of context, formal informatics principles and analytic skills. These were all transferable/transportable skill sets to one of the many other exciting and innovative arenas within healthcare. What I had arrived at in a narrow, specialty niche of healthcare was simply a microcosm of the greater healthcare landscape. The patterns, principles, need for data leverage, inefficiencies and the elements of human behavior related to change and adoption, are largely paralleled across a wider spectrum of healthcare. Any additional or unforeseen barriers that arise simply present a new challenge in the pioneering of a superior system.