Ochsner Health Promotes Chief Applications Officer to CIO
New Orleans-based Ochsner Health has promoted Amy Trainor, R.N., from Chief Applications Officer and Vice President of Clinical Systems to System Vice President and Chief Information Officer.
Trainor will lead the team responsible for the design, implementation and use of healthcare Information Services (IS) at the organization on a systemwide level. She will oversee IS alignment with strategic initiatives and will partner with Ochsner digital teams to make work easier and improve access for patients. Major emphases in the year ahead include reducing inbox burden and improving documentation for physicians, APPs and nurses.
As Chief Applications Officer and Vice President of Clinical Systems, Trainor was responsible for overseeing the implementation and maintenance of Ochsner’s electronic health record, patient experience and ancillary applications. Under Trainor’s leadership, the IS team completed a number of major projects, including Enterprise HIMSS Ambulatory Stage 7 validation, implementation of AI in-basket messaging, and improvements to nursing documentation and virtual nursing.
Ochsner operates 46 hospitals and more than 370 health and urgent care centers across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the Gulf South. Its Connected Health digital medicine program is caring for patients beyond its walls. In 2023, Ochsner Health cared for more than 1.5 million people from every state and 65 countries.
Trainor brings a clinical background to the field of IS. She started her career in healthcare as a Registered Nurse. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree from Louisiana State University and a Master of Healthcare Administration degree from LSU-Shreveport. She joined Ochsner in 2011 after working for Cerner, implementing an EHR at a local community hospital and hospital clinics.
Trainor was quoted last fall in a story about a pilot program involving generative AI. Ochsner Health launched a program that uses AI to draft simple messages to patients in the MyOchsner app portal. A small group of Ochsner clinicians are testing a new Epic feature that drafts responses to routine patient requests, which will then be reviewed and edited by the clinicians. The feature is meant to speed up app response time to patients and allows doctors to spend more time with patients.
“The AI will generate a draft for the clinician to review and send. It’s meant to help clinicians respond more quickly to patient messages, so patients can get answers to their questions sooner. And it will reduce time our clinicians are spending on computers so that they can spend more time doing what they do best—direct patient care," Trainor said. “At Ochsner, we are constantly looking for ways to improve our patient and provider experience, and we believe this pilot will show that AI can help relieve the messaging burden on our clinicians."
