From Chief Information Officer to Cancer Patient and Back Again

By In the Loop • February 21, 2019

After a cancer diagnosis, Mayo Clinic chief information officer Cris Ross got a firsthand look at the importance of continuously working toward improved health care IT. 

Over the past few years, Mayo Clinic has been making big changes in its information technology. Think electronic health record conversion. A new artificial intelligence program. Heightened information security. As Mayo Clinic's chief information officer, Cris Ross was one of many helping to navigate it all.

He would get a different view of these changes last July, when he was diagnosed with stage 3 colorectal cancer. "I was told it was pretty serious," he said while sharing his story at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's 2019 conference. Even so, thanks to the skill and dedication of his Mayo Clinic care team, Ross says there's hope on the horizon. "I've got a little further to go, but after this journey, my caregivers think that I can be cancer-free," he told the audience.

While Ross knows his cancer journey and patient experience "is not unique," he also knows it's forever changed the way he'll look at his job at Mayo Clinic once he returns in full force — and hopefully full health — later this spring. "We [Mayo Clinic] rolled out our new EHR as planned, and a few weeks later, I was being treated using that new system. Talk about eating your own cooking," he told the crowd gathered at the conference. As he underwent his "MRIs and CT scans, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, lab appointments and office visits," Ross says he "sometimes had to cringe at seeing a clinician struggle with something that we simply haven't mastered yet."

Ross says that's helped to shine a light on some of the challenges and opportunities for improvement that lie ahead for health care IT. "We know we can do better," he told his colleagues. And doing better, he said, means "being intolerant of the mediocre, and trust and collaboration between clinicians and technology professionals."

You can listen to his full address here. And you can read more about Ross' newfound perspective on improving Mayo Clinic's comprehensive information technology services for the good of all patients here.

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