In healthcare, innovation often gets the spotlight. But at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health in Palo Alto, Calif., the new chief medical information officer is just as focused on what happens quietly in the background: keeping everything running exactly as clinicians expect.
“Stability and predictability are a big part of the systems that we use in healthcare,” Keith Morse, MD, CMIO, told Becker’s. “When doctors show up in the morning and they log into their computers, they need things to work every day like they expect them to work.”
That commitment to reliability comes before the flashier parts of the role. His first priority is making sure the core functions — from 24-hour support teams to daily logins — are seamless for the clinicians and patients who depend on them. But even as he focuses on keeping the machine humming, his team is pushing ahead on projects that could redefine how pediatric care is delivered.
Pediatrics brings unique technological challenges, and Stanford has long tried to address some of the thorniest. One example is adolescent privacy. California law gives teens specific rights to confidential care, but electronic systems have traditionally linked patient records closely to parents and guardians. The task is to build systems flexible enough to adapt to vastly different levels of care ownership — the 14-year-old ready to manage their own care versus the 17-year-old who still relies on their parents.
“It’s up to us to create systems that can provide the confidentiality that teens want and have a right to,” Dr. Morse said, “but also be flexible enough to accommodate the different maturity trajectories that teens go on.”
While privacy shapes much of Stanford’s pediatric IT philosophy, AI is quickly becoming its next frontier. The health system recently finished rolling out ambient scribe tools across all ambulatory providers, allowing AI to generate documentation summaries and ease administrative work. It’s also piloting large language models behind the scenes, using them to flag surgical cases unlikely to involve infections. By identifying low-risk charts early, human reviewers can focus on the more complicated cases — a shift that saves time and sharpens attention on prevention.
Clinician interest in these tools has been striking.
“We are seeing such voracious interest from our clinicians to use this technology that it’s almost like we can’t get it into their hands fast enough,” he said.
The enthusiasm stands in contrast to typical IT rollouts, where staff often need to be nudged toward adoption. Here, curiosity about AI’s impact on patient care is driving demand.
Even as new tools emerge, he points to quieter changes that have already transformed care. In the past five years, the ability to share medical information between institutions has dramatically improved. As a pediatrician, he often sees patients who have cycled through multiple clinics and emergency rooms before arriving at Stanford. Now, he can view documentation, lab results, vital signs and medication records almost instantly — a shift that lets families focus on their child’s needs rather than reconstructing chaotic medical histories.
“It’s not perfect,” he said, “but we are able to do things now that would have been unheard of five or 10 years ago.”
He describes his role as finding the “Goldilocks” balance — that “just right” steadiness between change and stability — moving the system forward without overwhelming clinicians and families with constant shifts.
“Stability and predictability are ultimately our highest priorities,” he said. “But we also recognize that change is inevitable, and we want change. There are immense opportunities for improvement in how we deliver care and in the IT systems that support that care.”
It’s a delicate rhythm — maintaining what works while reshaping what’s possible. And at Stanford Children’s, he sees plenty of space to do both.
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