Meet the Innovators: Chief Health Information Officer combines love of medicine and technology to change healthcare for good

Welcome to “Meet the Innovators,” a series of stories profiling the leaders and frontline change agents working in and with HCA Healthcare’s department of Digital Transformation and Innovation (DT&I, formerly Care Transformation & Innovation). Learn how they got to where they are and how they are helping to build the future of patient-centered care.  

Meet Jake

It was a typical Emergency Department (ED), where the sterile scent of antiseptics mixed with beeping monitors. The muffled footsteps of physicians and nurses hurrying from room to room combined with their urgent voices to create a scene of controlled chaos. Jake, a 20-year-old college student, stood on the periphery observing as a motorcyclist was brought in with severe injuries received in a traffic accident.

Immediately, Jake saw the ED team, which included his physician uncle, spring into action to deliver well-practiced trauma care. While the scene was intense for a young man job-shadowing for the day, he watched as the team treated the patient with clinical expertise and compassion. The experience was exhilarating and humbling and left a lasting impression on Jake, helping to shape the next several decades of his life.

Growing up in Connecticut, his childhood memories include a lot of quality family time and writing programs in BASIC on his personal computer. Before embarking on his own journey in medicine, Jake continued to be inspired by medical professionals in his family, including the uncle who provided his first real taste of emergency medicine.

Given his scientific curiosity and penchant for research, a young Jake applied for a scholarship with an essay on the potential of computers to model therapeutic impacts on the human body — a concept that has since become a reality with advancements in AI and protein folding models. During this time, this type of interest and his academic experiences initially led Jake to pursue a career in science. A pivotal event in college, however, changed the course of his studies and future professional life.

While at Dartmouth College, he received an urgent call alerting him that his grandmother had been hospitalized with a ruptured aortic aneurysm. Talking to family members about his critically ill grandmother, he felt out of his depth and was driven to seek more information and a better understanding of what was happening to her. In that defining moment, Jake realized he wanted to understand medicine and advance the capacity of modern healthcare. He would enroll at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, where he found himself invigorated by the opportunity to help people through the practice of medicine.  After graduating from medical school, he went on to complete a residency in emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and began practicing emergency medicine at a hospital in Virginia.

Career in medicine: an intersection of patient care, science and education

Jake O’Shea, MD, MBA, FACEP – who now serves as VP and chief health information officer for HCA Healthcare and its department of Digital Transformation and Innovation (DT&I) – has found his niche and reflects upon his career journey.

“My career path has not been linear. I often think about how observing my uncle in the ED and feeling helpless through my grandmother’s critical illness helped lead me into medical school and practicing emergency medicine – and then how my passion for patient care combined with my interest in computers to eventually steer me in the direction of medical informatics and healthcare technology,” Dr. O’Shea  explained.

As Dr. O’Shea’s career evolved, he would eventually accept roles that combined his two areas of interest: medicine and technology. His professional life took a significant turn when he was asked to advise on the implementation of a new Electronic Health Record (EHR) at a large healthcare organization. The fortuitous opportunity allowed him to merge his medical expertise with his passion for technology and process improvement. While serving as a medical director of the EHR, Dr. O’Shea dedicated himself to making the system as user-friendly and efficient as possible for healthcare providers. His aim? To help care team members more easily navigate the EHR, allowing them to spend more time with patients.

This experience was the perfect segue to HCA Healthcare, where his EHR acumen has been an asset for more than a decade.

Leading digital transformation in healthcare

Dr. O’Shea’s commitment to advancing healthcare through technology has taken him on a career journey reminiscent of his childhood, where his early love for tinkering with his computer has now evolved into working full time with the EHR platforms used by HCA Healthcare.

He first joined the organization as a Regional Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO) with HCA Healthcare’s Capital Division, where he was responsible for implementing Meditech Advanced Clinicals, including physician documentation and computerized provider order entry, across 15 hospitals in Virginia, New Hampshire and Indiana. As this project neared completion, he took on a leadership role with the ED service line in the Capital Division, and was eventually appointed as the first Chief Medical Officer (CMO) at HCA Healthcare affiliate Johnston-Willis Hospital, and subsequently at Chippenham Hospital.

In 2019, Dr. O’Shea became Chief Medical Officer of HCA Healthcare’s Capital Division and was tested early in his tenure as COVID-19 appeared and he helped navigate the division through the diverse challenges of the pandemic. His leadership paved the way for new healthcare practices, setting up the first COVID vaccine clinics for caregivers in late 2020. These actions underscored the importance of clear communication and support for healthcare providers.

After four years in this role, his extensive background in HCA Healthcare facility leadership, division leadership and informatics aligned perfectly to allow Dr. O’Shea to advance into his current position: VP and Chief Health Information Officer of HCA Healthcare. In this role, he also serves as the executive sponsor for the introduction of MEDITECH Expanse, the new EHR being deployed across the HCA Healthcare enterprise that will transform clinical workflow and the many ways healthcare will be improved in the era of AI and other advanced technologies.

“Having a strong foundation of technologies and an underlying platform that meet the requirements of DT&I’s work for HCA Healthcare is imperative for digital transformation,” said Dr. Mike Schlosser, senior vice president and chief transformation officer, HCA Healthcare. “Dr. O’Shea is a fantastic leader and healthcare innovator. He has built this major infrastructure around our EHR and informatics agenda, ensuring our work will reach its full potential to support our hospitals, care teams and patients.”

Changing healthcare for good

The DT&I department at HCA Healthcare, an evolution of the Care Transformation and Innovation (CT&I) team founded in 2021, aims to expand HCA Healthcare’s digital and AI strategy. This department focuses on enhancing patient care, streamlining operations and optimizing business processes through advanced technology and data systems.

Dr. O’Shea’s team ensures data standardization, which is crucial for seamless processing and accurate results. A key driver of this is the enterprise transition to the cloud-based EHR Expanse, which will drive consistent data collection from the outset.

Related article: (HCA Healthcare Magazine) Enhancing Patient Care Hospital-wide With Modern, Cloud-Hosted Technology

As a modernized EHR, Expanse is more than just a data entry tool. The foundation of the Expanse platform is its standard build across facilities, which will create enterprise-wide consistency. When a healthcare provider places an order to give a medication to a patient in this model, the standardized data behind those pieces of the patient journey can be consumed by advanced analytic tools due to Expanse’s open platform architecture. The data is analyzed, flows back into Expanse and then informs care team decision making.

Designed to create efficiencies and improve the coordination of care for patients, Expanse captures physician orders and documentation and transmits information across care teams. Expanse also gives nurses convenient access to patient information on the go so they can view patient charts, scan medications and print lab labels from a mobile device.

In short, Expanse is a key pillar of HCA Healthcare’s future innovation plans as an organization, which will rely upon having an electronic health record that connects innovative technologies.

As the AI revolution continues, it offers great promise for the future of healthcare. Dr. O’Shea believes that AI will be deeply integrated into healthcare, as a tool to augment – but not replace – human caregivers. One challenge he sees is the need to continue to evolve AI models for accuracy and specificity while managing the significant computing power required, all following HCA Healthcare’s responsible AI program and its policies.

The key questions for the next 10-15 years will be how to reduce the power burden of AI models or find more efficient ways to compute advanced healthcare solutions. This will be crucial as the demand for AI in healthcare continues to grow, designed to better serve the needs of our patients, care team members and every touch point across the health system.

Related podcast: (Federation of American Hospitals: Hospitals in Focus) The Future of Medicine: AI’s Role in Healthcare

Advice from the innovator

DT&I’s purpose is to create the future of patient-centered care by solving longstanding industry issues in healthcare delivery through the clinically led integration of technology into care. That means clinical input – the clinician’s voice – comes first.

HCA Healthcare has a significant responsibility to leverage these advancements to improve patient care and support healthcare providers. This responsibility and core focus on innovation underscores HCA Healthcare’s mission: Above all else, we are committed to the care and improvement of human life.