In this episode

Michelle Stansbury has been at Houston Methodist for more than 30 years, and she’s been instrumental in forming a culture of practical innovation at one of the United States’ leading health systems. In this episode, Stansbury, now the Associate Chief Innovation Officer and VP, IT Applications at Houston Methodist, highlights key accomplishments and explains the principles that enable Houston Methodist to stay on the cutting edge of practical technology and care innovations.

• • Houston Methodist uses an “embedded” model where operational and IT leaders work together to improve specific functional areas.
  • A hands-on culture of jumping in and solving problems keeps the organization innovative.
  • Innovation should be approached as another way of providing patient care.

“Everyone understands: if you see a problem, think about it. Bring it up. We have a very strong culture.”

– Michelle Stansbury

Key takeaways

Stansbury shared insights from more than 30 years of leadership at the organization and discussed what makes Houston Methodist’s approach uniquely successful. Here’s what she covered:

Houston Methodist uses an “embedded” model where operational and IT leaders work together to improve specific functional areas.

The project Stansbury said stands out as one of most enjoyable in her career was the organization’s transition to their Epic EHR. “It was a three-year project, a ‘big bang’ go-live…and we were back to normal operations within two weeks,” she said. Stansbury attributed the project’s stunning success to operations and IT working as a team, instead of as separate functions. “IT and operations work so hand-in-hand that you wouldn’t know one from the other,” she said.

Stansbury said that this partnership ensures that technology is not only deployed well, but also adopted and operationalized. “IT knows how to install things. We know how to make sure they’re working appropriately. But if operations is not adopting things, it’s not going to work. Technology is not going to work on its own,” she said.

After the success of this approach with Houston Methodist’s Epic go-live, they’ve continued to use it successfully. “We take operational resources out of their day-to-day roles and put them on a project team along with IT resources. It’s not seen as an IT project because they’re a project team,” said Stansbury. When Houston Methodist recently went live with a brand-new smart hospital built from the ground up, cross-functional teams ensured that each new technology and the entire hospital worked smoothly. From OR cameras to patient texting to voice AI, the hospital is designed to be a “future bet” on the next generation of technology-enabled hospital care. Even with so many new technologies, a new location, and new staff, “it was phenomenal to see how quickly it opened up” using the cross-functional project team model, Stansbury said.

A hands-on culture of jumping in and solving problems keeps the organization innovative.

“Transformation comes when individuals are thinking out of the box about ‘How do we do things differently?'” said Stansbury. Reflecting on her career at Houston Methodist, one out-of-the box solution stands out. Houston Methodist, Texas Children’s, and Baylor College of Medicine recognized the negative impact on the patient experience if a patient was seen at multiple health systems and had separate data at each. “The CIOs got together and decided that they wanted to create an enterprise master patient index across the three facilities…we were way ahead of our time,” she said.

This willingness to jump in and solve problems is one of Stansbury’s favorite aspects of working at Houston Methodist. She looks back at big tech companies entering the healthcare industry as an indication that there are problems to be solved in the patient journey, and notes how Houston Methodist’s can-do culture keeps the organization innovative. “[Tech companies] were like, ‘You all can’t do it. We’re going to step in, create a healthcare arm, and we’re going to solve healthcare.’ We said, ‘We know what our problems are. We live them every day. So what are the things we’re going to do to transform these problems ourselves, instead of waiting around for someone to do it for us?'”

Stansbury said that innovation is woven into the Houston Methodist mission. “Our mission is to provide the best quality care, service, and innovation. It’s not quality or service or innovation. It’s and. So everyone understands, if you see a problem that you know we need to address, don’t just be quiet. Think about it. Bring it up. Talk about it. If there are solutions you’ve seen out there, bring them to see…that’s proliferated through our entire organization. And we do have a very, very strong culture.”

Innovation should be approached as another way of providing patient care.

Stansbury describes innovative projects practically, in terms of the pain points they’re solving or ways they’ll improve day-to-day functions for clinicians, staff, and patients. “People don’t go into innovation thinking, ‘Hey, this is cool,'” she said. “There are true problems to solve…[like] patients saying, ‘Why do I have to provide the same information over again?’ We’re trying to make the patient journey frictionless.”

Houston Methodist’s new Cypress smart hospital is an example of how Stansbury and her colleagues applied an innovative mindset and new technology to patient care. She describes looking for inefficiencies like writing down vitals on a patient’s door sign, or manual documentation for stretched-thin physicians and nurses, and then applying new technology to improve them. “How can we make what we do better for our patients, better for our clinicians, and create operational efficiencies?” she said.

“Everyone knows what our goal is. The patient is at the center of everything we do,” said Stansbury, whether that’s stopping in the hallway to give directions or pursuing excellence in a new project. “I don’t do direct patient care, [but] I’m doing what I can to help those who make that happen.”