Designing for Health: Interview with Kevin Dufendach, MD, and Andy Spooner, MD

Pediatricians are some of the most meticulous clinical professionals, and for good reason. The tiniest error in a NICU or PICU can have massive implications for a patient. This detail-oriented mindset often leads pediatricians to gravitate toward clinical informatics, as the same outlook applies to the world of electronic health records (EHR) and clinical data. In today’s data-driven environment, nothing exists outside the EHR, so how can pediatricians and other clinicians think more like informaticians to improve outcomes and streamline operations?

On this episode of In Network’s Designing for Health podcast feature, Nordic Chief Medical Officer Craig Joseph, MD, chats with two doctors from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, neonatologist and biomedical informaticist Kevin Dufendach, MD, and CMIO Andy Spooner, MD. Their discussion centers around their early days in the NICU, why so many pediatricians end up also working as informaticists, and the role of AI in reducing documentation.

You can find complete show notes on the originally published article on Nordic’s blog.

Meet the Host

Craig Joseph, MD

Chief Medical Officer
LinkedIn: Craig Joseph MD, FAAP, FAMIA
X: @CraigJoseph
Read his articles

Dr. Joseph is the Chief Medical Officer of Nordic Consulting Partners, a global healthcare management consulting firm. Craig has 30 years of healthcare and IT experience. In addition to practicing medicine as a primary care pediatrician for eight years, he worked for Epic for six-plus years and has served as chief medical information officer at multiple healthcare organizations, using both Cerner and Epic.

Craig is a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics and American Medical Informatics Association. He remains actively board-certified in both pediatrics and clinical informatics.

About the Show

When it comes to how healthcare works in the U.S., one wonders, who designed it? Well, no one. And that’s the problem. Dr. Craig Joseph speaks with luminaries from across the health ecosystem about how to make healthcare work for humans. The upshot? The way out of the frustrating, expensive, and frequently ineffective quagmire of the U.S. healthcare system is to take a step back and bring intentional, human-centered design to an ecosystem that works for the people giving and receiving care.

Follow the show’s social hashtag #DesigningforHealth.