Marty Paslick is HCA Healthcare’s chief information officer. He has been with the organization for more than three decades and leads its Information Technology Group (ITG), a team of more than 6,000 colleagues that provide IT strategy and support for HCA Healthcare and its 182 hospitals and more than 2,300 sites of care.
If you want to innovate, you can work almost anywhere. If you want to innovate with purpose and impact, you need to work somewhere with a strong mission. For me, that has always been the driving force of innovation – how to improve the way we do things to create a better outcome for patients.
At HCA Healthcare, our mission is to care for and improve human life. We believe, as one of our founders Dr. Thomas Frist Sr. once said, that “bettering the human condition is the greatest good any individual can achieve.” Improvement — always searching for a better way — is in HCA Healthcare’s DNA. And anytime you’re focused on improvement, you’re talking about innovation.
Innovation at HCA Healthcare is exciting because we are responsible for 35 million annual patient encounters each year, so we see opportunities to innovate that are not as visible or possible at other healthcare organizations. When our colleagues find a way to improve care for one patient, it can make healthcare better for millions of patients being cared for within and outside of our facilities. That concept and opportunity resonates with and inspires our Information Technology Group colleagues.
I’ve actually experienced our mission’s impact on innovation firsthand, with two admissions to our hospitals for intensive care. Some might call me the ultimate secret shopper. But it’s a powerful thing when you get to see how the tools and technologies your team helped develop, test and deploy make a measurable, meaningful difference in someone’s health. As a patient, I got to see how our SPOT tool quickly provides caregivers with the information they need to know who to check for sepsis.
And that’s just one example. From our use of data science and analytics to mobile solutions and emerging possibilities offered by AI and wearable technology, we are continually challenging the status quo in healthcare.
Where else can a technology professional be part of a team making that level of purpose and impact?
They say Gen Z cares more about purposeful work than any other generation and wants to be part of organizations that share their values. At HCA Healthcare, we are constantly looking for a better way and we have the resources and scale to back it up, all in the service of helping improve people’s lives. There’s no better place to innovate with impact than right here.
