The Bermuda Hospitals Board’s first system-wide electronic medical record platform has had a significant impact.

Patient Electronic and Administrative Records, or Pearl, was launched four years ago. Gina Benjamin, BHB’s vice-president of digital health, said the system had changed both her team’s role and its relationship to clinical care.

“When I started nine years ago, we were information technology services and we just provided IT support,” Ms Benjamin said at the Healthcare CIO Connect 2026 conference.

“We have highlighted that we are not the owners of the application,” she said in the boardroom of KPMG on Par-la-Ville Road in Hamilton. “It’s actually organisation ownership.

“We don’t make any decisions when it comes to digital health, in silo. We get feedback from the clinicians and the front line and that helps with adoption.”

She characterised the early phase as digital optimisation, where paper processes were transferred into digital form.

“With any sort of digital transformation, you have to have organisational change management,” she said. “It was a learning curve and some people were able to get on board really quickly.”

She urged technology leaders to be deliberate about what they introduce. “We have to be very mindful that we are not putting in technology just for the sake of putting in technology,” she said.

Before adopting a tool, she suggested asking whether the process is actually broken and what the technology is meant to fix.

“We want to be able to transform, but what are we trying to fix?”

Another panellist, Stefan Loretan, deputy CIO at Swiss Medical Network in Switzerland, said digital transformation should reduce friction for healthcare workers — not add another layer of complexity.

His team has brought clinicians and other people with frontline experience into technology work to better understand problems and redesign processes.

“The mission we have been giving out to people for these years: you have to give back time to the people, so they have more time for the patients,” Mr Loretan said.

He also stressed that interoperability remains difficult, particularly when providers use many different systems.

Ed Marx, chief executive of Marx Advisory, a boutique healthcare advisory firm in Dallas, Texas, said: “What I would like to see more people do is take all that data and actually use it in real time to save lives.”

He argued that systems need incentives to support prevention and transformation, not just traditional service delivery.

The discussion also touched on artificial intelligence in healthcare.

Ms Benjamin said that AI is being adopted quickly, but stressed the importance of keeping human oversight in the process.

The opportunity, in her view, has to be weighed alongside the risks rather than pursued simply to keep pace with new tools.

Asked what she would change with a magic wand, Ms Benjamin focused on using data more effectively.

“We have a significant amount of data to make better decisions,” she said.

This was the second year of the conference, hosted by Ms Benjamin and Keltie Jamieson, the BHB’s chief health information officer.

Ms Benjamin said together they had more than 30 years of experience in healthcare.

“This is independent, but we partner closely with KPMG and Bermuda Hospitals Board to make this happen,” Ms Benjamin told The Royal Gazette.

“The driver behind the conference was to create a space for healthcare technology leaders and decision-makers to collaborate and discuss real-world problems and network to allow them to build a phone-a-friend network.”

Panel moderator Edward Fitzgerald said the idea for the discussion was to hear different perspectives and what works and what does not.

Dr Fitzgerald, head of KPMG’s Global Centre of Excellence for Island Healthcare, said Bermuda is well placed to share its experience.

“There are few other small island jurisdictions that have electronic health records for the public system, and Bermuda is looked on very favourably for being out in front in that,” Dr Fitzgerald said.

“People are looking at Bermuda for the advice and guidance of someone who has done it well.”