Skip Rollins, CIO and chief information security officer at Freeman Health in Joplin, Mo., stumbled into a part-time IT job in college and he's "been lucky enough to never do anything else for a living," he said.
In this episode of "Becker’s Healthcare Digital Health + Health IT" podcast, Mr. Rollins discusses IT challenges like building a team and budgeting. Below is an excerpt from the conversation, and the full episode can be heard here.
Note: This response has been lightly edited for clarity.
Question: What are the top challenges that you're preparing for over the next year or two?
Skip Rollins: Freeman is a community health system, and I would say very, very typical to most community health systems in that Freeman tries every way we can to maximize our investments. Freeman has been on the same EMR that they're on now since the late 1990s. There was a big upgrade in 2012 before I came to work at Freeman. But, now we're at a point where we feel like we've got all we can out of the EMR we have, and it's time for us to move to a different platform. That challenge for us has been a difficult one because, as you can imagine, speaking the kind of money it takes to install a new EMR at an organization our size is something that we don't want to do very often, and we call it a 10- to 20-year investment. Set aside the disruption in the organization, but just the financial burden that it puts on the organization is difficult.