In collaboration with CHIME, Becker's Hospital Review's "Life of a Healthcare CIO" series features leading hospital and health system CIOs from across the country who are sharing their experiences, best practices and challenges.
To recommend a CIO to be featured in this series, please contact Akanksha Jayanthi or (ajayanthi@beckershealthcare.com) or Elizabeth Earl (eearl@beckershealthcare.com).
An interview with Eric Carey, CIO of Ridgewood, N.J.-based Valley Health System. (Note: Interview has been edited for length and clarity).
Question: How long have you been with Valley Health System, and how has your job changed during that time?
Eric Carey: I have been with Valley since 1994. I began as the manager of application development — which oversaw all the custom programming activities — and moved through to become the director of the department, assistant vice president and ultimately CIO four years ago. The entire world of information systems is annually becoming a more critical corporate operation. Previously, we were more in the peripheral zone. Now, every department and every staff person is utilizing some service out of the information systems area on a daily basis. We are so integrated with operations that we have to be involved at the highest levels of planning, projecting growth, development opportunities and operational efficiency. We're in every corner of operations now.
Q: Valley started implementing a new MEDITECH EHR platform early last year. How has that implementation process been going?
EC: We implemented MEDITECH's Magic platform in 1995. What we started this past January was a migration to their 6.x platform. A platform upgrade in the MEDITCH space means all new hardware, all new software and basically a reimplementation of the system. We are scheduled to go live June of this year. That scope involves every employee, every physician and every physician office in the community that's associated with the health system. It's a massive process. It was a big-bang go-live, which means every department goes live at the same time. It's been going very much according to plan. We're getting down to the final stages where we're going to find last-minute show-stopper types of issues, but at this point we don't have anything that will prevent our June go-live.
Q: In your time with Valley Health System, what has been your biggest accomplishment?
EC: The biggest accomplishment for our information systems department is we've continued to grow to meet the increasing demands of the organization thanks to a commitment of our executive team all the way up to the board. That commitment includes very strong capital support and strong operational support to grow the size of the department. When I joined Valley in 1994, there were about 10 information systems-related individuals within the organization, and now we have over 95. That's just an amazing commitment from the organization's perspective. We feel very well supported.
Also, we invest significantly in making sure our information systems are operationally efficient. We outsource almost none of our information systems. We have our own help desk 24/7, and we have our own information technology infrastructure people who design, architect, implement and support the system. We maintain all our data centers on site. We have our own application support people, our own develop programmer, intranet support people. One of the main benefits of that type of model is that we can be nimble and really respond to our injuries quickly because we don't have the burden of finding some outsourcing or consulting pool to serve the needs of our users. The thing we're most proud of in the end is we've grown and we remain nimble and flexible to meet the vey quickly changing needs of consumers.
Q: What do you see as your biggest misstep or mistake?
EC: The meaningful use roadmap has been extremely frustrating for everybody, and the government's schedule of being very late to the game with their expectations has put tremendous pressure on vendors and organizations to meet the expectations and play to unrealistic timeframes. My regret is that there wasn't some way for us as a country to partner better between the vendors and the health systems to come up with a better cohesive timeline so that everyone really could participate appropriately. It has caused significant hardship, even in our organization which has successfully attained the levels of meaningful use. It has been at the cost of user satisfaction, user productivity, efficiency, and in some cases, it's created some unsafe patient conditions because vendors are pushing features to market in such short timelines that they're not sufficiently stabilized. It's a regret in the sense of I wish we could have done something about it, but I'm just one guy in New Jersey. It doesn't feel like teamwork on a very large scale.
Q: In the past month or so, what project has taken up the majority of your time?
EC: The implementation of the MEDITECH system. We're all consumed. We have 20 full-time consultants on site all day, everyday. We have 26 teams representing about 400 staff and physicians on teams. We begin our training of the end users, which will require about 6,000 people-days of training, in about a month and a half. It's the crunch time for finalizing the training materials, preparing all the classrooms and teachers and scheduling. At the same time, in parallel, we're finishing the build and making sure all configurations are properly tested. We're in the crunch time.
Q: What is the biggest challenge you're facing right now?
EC: [The MEDITECH implementation is] also our biggest challenge in the respect that we have so many resources there that it does make it difficult to maintain daily operations. When so much of your resource pool is put toward this special project, it takes a lot to make sure you're maintaining day-to-day operations.
Another big challenge I have, which is regional, is there seems to be a bit of a shortage of information systems candidates in our area to fill our open positions. We have about nine open positions right now, so we're also slightly understaffed. Throw that in the mix as well, it's quite stressful. Most all of the stress is compounded by the fact that despite that this new system is nicer, more modern and more efficient than our existing system, you're taking a company through change, and change is just very hard for the majority of people. When they come to work today and they turn on their computer, they do A, B, C, D and E. When we go live they're not going to do A, B, C, D and E in that order any more. All their normal patterns and efficiencies go away. We have training and awareness of change as part of our rollout project. We know it will be difficult. We'll help you through it, and in some number of weeks into your new system, you'll be back to being an expert again.
Q: What is one lesson you've learned during your career that you'd like to share with other CIOs?
EC: One lesson is the importance of learning how to embrace new technology and generational changes in how technology is used. We're going through this now with millennials, such as the change from email and voicemail to texting and Facebook, or YouTube versus a printed manual. You have tried and true mechanisms for training people and communicating that worked for the past 10 years, but the new generation doesn't work that way. The lesson we keep trying to teach our team is you have to look at the new people and the new technology and not hold too tight to what you've had all these years. You can't stop it. That's what I have to remind myself everyday: Look at the new stuff, don't ignore it. Always think of what's next. You can't stay status quo.
More articles in the Life of a healthcare CIO series:
Life of a healthcare CIO: University of Mississippi's David Chou
Life of a healthcare CIO: Sparrow Health System's Thomas Bres
Life of a healthcare CIO: UAB's Joan Hicks