Why this Risant leader’s goal is to ‘flip things around’

Jessica Bartell, MD, has spent her career navigating the payer and provider sides of healthcare, along with time in health IT. That breadth of experience taught her that transformation requires more than just good intentions.

“What I learned over time is that one must align all the different change levers at the same time — incentives, clinical programs, data and analytics, technology and policy — to make truly transformational change,” she said.

That conviction is what drew her to Washington, D.C.-based Risant Health. In September, she became the organization’s chief medical information officer. Launched by Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente, Risant was designed to expand value-based care beyond its own footprint. For Dr. Bartell, the appeal was clear: “Risant Health has the opportunity to pull all these levers, and I am excited to contribute to this effort.”

She describes her approach with a touch of humor: “I have recently been joking that I am the CMIO — Chief Medical ‘I’m here to help’ Officer,” she said. Beyond leading informatics and analytics strategies, she sees her role as facilitating listening sessions, connecting teams with resources, communicating vision and advocating for alignment.

Her initial priorities focus on the fundamentals: optimizing EHR builds and workflows, strengthening data and analytics, and ensuring Risant’s organizations have a reliable technology foundation. From there, she plans to connect hospitals, clinics and affiliates such as skilled nursing and home health, then build advanced analytics and technology that all can share.

“In the first year, our key priority is to develop a scalable and replicable process to translate the best of Kaiser Permanente into the multi-payer environment of the Risant Health organizations,” she said. That includes “identifying gaps and lifting up best practices within each organization to scale across Risant Health.”

A practicing primary care physician for more than 20 years, Dr. Bartell said that perspective continues to shape her leadership style.

“I am absolutely a primary care physician at heart,” she said. “I wanted to flip things around in healthcare: to make it easy for providers to do the right things for their patients, to let patients drive their own care when possible and to set up systems to automate what can be automated.”

She also recognizes that “even good change can be hard.” Small workflow shifts, she noted, can cause disruption. “We have to be careful about when and how we introduce change, ensuring that we are painting the vision of where we are going — and above all, supporting the humans involved.”

She emphasized that Risant’s success will depend on partnership across its member systems. Each organization brings its own clinical, operational and IT leaders, and Dr. Bartell sees her role as supporting and coordinating with them rather than dictating. In her view, open communication and strong collaboration are essential to aligning the system as a whole.

Artificial intelligence will be part of Risant’s strategy, though Dr. Bartell said the organization is approaching it cautiously. She noted that governance structures are being built with “responsible AI” principles — fairness, safety, reliability, privacy, transparency and accountability — at the forefront.

She also sees near-term opportunities to make the patient journey smoother by connecting data across settings.

“With a complete view of a patient’s health and healthcare, clinicians can make better care recommendations,” she said. In the next year, she added, Risant could begin using “AI-generated care summaries (based on complete data) that give clinicians concise and accurate summaries of patient information as they are seeing patients.”

For Dr. Bartell, the yardstick for all this is clear.

“Ultimately, Risant Health’s primary focus is on improving clinical outcomes, and the most important measure we can hold ourselves to is how we’re helping health systems bring value-based care to more lives.”

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