ABSTRACT
John Kravitz, Chief information officers of Geisinger Health, a leading health system with 11 campuses and 13 hospitals in Pennsylvania, speaks about how the organization’s leaders were “blown away” by how technology stepped up to help address the COVID-19 crisis. Geisinger’s Information technology organization responded to a 500% increase in telehealth visits and enabled a doubling of remote workers to 13,000 employees in the initial weeks of the pandemic. While the pandemic caused some degree of reprioritization of ongoing enterprise IT projects in some health systems, others, such as University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Geisinger Health in Pennsylvania, were accelerating* their digital transformation roadmaps, encouraged by the success of telehealth in responding to the crisis and also sensing a fundamental shift in healthcare delivery. Until the COVID-19 pandemic, relative to other sectors, healthcare had been slow to adopt digital technology.
