While IT departments have been successful over the last year, the IT workforce is tired, and the separation of IT work from general healthcare creates new challenges. In this presentation, we will share the lessons learned on how effective IT support enabled a large health system to manage the pandemic and the current surge in demand for care and vaccinations. The pandemic has forced healthcare IT departments to become more agile and deliver new functionality in near real time. Development efforts that traditionally took months were compressed into weeks.

We identify the six IT capabilities that are essential to any healthcare delivery system: testing and contact tracing, patient classification, seamless documentation, telehealth, remote monitoring in ICU and other remote settings, collaborative capacity planning across healthcare delivery systems, and effective governance through one-stop requirements generation.

Objectives:

• Present an overview of the COVID-19 health IT response at a major health system
• Identify six key IT capabilities that every health system should create
• Explain the challenges that are ahead.