Dell Medical School 'tethering the city together from day one,' executive says

When Aaron Miri became chief information officer for the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas six months ago, he took on a team focused on delivering technology solutions to the new school.

Miri, who previously worked as chief information officer for Massachusetts-based Imprivata and Dallas-based Walnut Hill Medical Center, collaborates with clinicians, technology partners and local leaders to leverage technology to improve health care.

Miri has the ear of congressional leaders, serving on the U.S. Health and Human Services federal Health IT Advisory Committee.

The medical school, which opened its doors to students in 2016, has piqued the community's interest for its relationships with health tech giants and startups, innovative approach to health care and the management of health records.

READ MORE: Is Austin on track to become a health tech hub?

"I think this role, from where I sit, is one of the most interesting because I not only have to know the technology, I also have to know the business of each of our missions," Miri said.

The American-Statesman spoke with Miri about Dell Medical School's future, its challenges and his role. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

American-Statesman: What is your vision for the future of Dell Medical School, and how does your role here play into that?

Miri: I see Dell Medical School and UT Health Austin as the nexus for the city. When it comes to technology that intersects with health care, we should be part of that same fabric. We have all of the elements here to enable any startup in the area — a mature billion dollar brand new Apple campus, Google buildings, all the way down to ABC startup that’s in stealth mode and doesn’t know how to break in.

The other thing from a vision perspective of technology is I don’t believe in trying to put 10,000 solutions out there and hope they all stick. I believe in smart, vetted, partnership solutions that our clinicians, our chairs, our faculty, our researchers buy into and use those as enterprise pieces.

What are the challenges before Dell Medical School can reach that vision?

We’re coming in and suddenly we’re Switzerland, so we’re not competing with anybody. We’re here to take care of health care and teach, so how do you disrupt and galvanize an ecosystem that has been working well for a long time — not ideal but well. How do we then make smart partnerships to make sure that we’re enabling folks, and inadvertently companies, so that organizations don’t turn a cold shoulder to you because they feel threatened in some way?

It’s been really positive thus far, but no one’s under any illusions. One day someone’s going to get grumpy or disagree with something. We’re going to have to work though those, but that’s part of it. Part of being new and part of being UT is that you already come in with an expectation of the weight of the world on your shoulders, so now it’s executing and delivering and making sure that we bring everybody along for the ride.

Do you expect Dell Med and Austin’s health district to work on the level of Houston or Dallas?

I would say yes. Having led Dallas for a long time at multiple institutions there, I think we can do better than Dallas, and I say that with respect to Dallas. Dallas grew up with different sectors...Austin is not that big yet.

We’re tethering the city together from day one. When you have that, my hope is 10 years from now, 15 years from now, 20 years from now — when Austin is the size of Dallas-Fort Worth — we don’t have the geographic disparities.

The other thing with tech — and I love Austin for this — it is truly becoming the Silicon Valley of the south. There’s a lot of phenomenal startups here. But what I have seen that Boston had, and Dallas was beginning to develop before I left it, was this sophistication in terms of: Am I building a tech stack like a Zoho or some of those other companies here? Or am I building a health care specific startup to do XYZ workflow? I think this city is just now beginning to figure that out...I would encourage all of those startups to reach out and just ask. I think the beautiful thing about UT is to make it fully accessible to everybody.

Is the hope that the school’s efforts to use electronic health care records could expand to hospitals all over Austin and in Texas?

Again, we’re Switzerland, so we’re not directly competing with anybody. We want to enable this to be the right thing — the entire continuum of care, not just inpatient and to build hospitals for the sake of building hospitals.

We’re taking back what we learned, not just to the payers and others, but at a national level. I’m a congressionally appointed member to several federal committees … We’re educating lawmakers both national and local on: This is what you need to do and what you need to look at.

What technology do you expect to come out of Dell Med in the next several years?

We’re really going to look at how do we leverage augmented reality in a way for faculty purposes of teaching. How can we help people doing gross anatomy on cadavers to also do that via Oculus or some sort of VR goggles or augmented reality? All those kinds of things, we’re testing right now in the clinics — not to do technology for technology’s sake, but to see if there is meat on the bone here, is there viability and how could we deploy this.

Another thing you’re going to see us do is really partnerships with the local health information exchange here in the community and how do we help the local HIE provide it more data so it's a more rich, robust information sharing platform for the whole city. It’s been here for a long time, so how can we help them? I don’t want to recreate what Austin already has infrastructure here to do, but how can we partner with them? How can we give them something more robust so other people benefit from it downstream?