An Interview with Mikki Clancy
Author:
April 2007
What is Premier Health Partners?
Premier Health Partners is a joint operating agreement between Miami Valley Hospital, Good Samaritan Hospital, Middletown Regional Hospital, and several affiliates. Information Technology and Telecommunications are shared services for the hospitals and subsidiaries and are centrally managed at the PHP level of the organization.
What are your responsibilities at Premier Health Partners and how did you end up in your current position?
My present responsibilities include overall responsibility for Information Technology, Telecommunications, and Miami Valley Hospital/Good Samaritan Hospital Health Information Management Services. I have worked at Premier Health Partners or one of its member hospitals for 13 years. I started as the Information Technology Auditor after move to the greater Dayton area. I specialized in process design, controls, and information security. In 1999, I was asked to take over the Y2K program after the departure of key leadership. fter Y2K, I became Director of Applications. When the CIO retired in 2002, I was promoted to Vice President and Chief Information Officer. At our IT in Healthcare seminar last year, you spoke about your work putting out your new Electronic Medical Records system.
You were getting ready to do the initial deployment. How did that go for you?
We went live with our first hospital, Miami Valley Hospital, on October 14th 2006. The implementation included changing over 1500 workflows and new technology for over 6000 clinical users and physicians. The implementation included implementation of wireless networking, fingerprint authentication technology, deployment of workstations and thin clients in patient rooms, hallways and nursing units, redundant RS6000, voice recognition, and Citrix server farm, and ten applications (clinical documentation, pharmacy, clinical orders, emergency and trauma center - including physician order entry and medical documentation, patient scheduling, ambulatory electronic medical record - including medical documentation and physician order entry, enterprise master person index, charging, evidence-based rules and alerting engine, and a clinical data repository. The go-live went extremely well but not without some challenges. We continue to use the super users (clinical users that help with one-on-one coaching and mentoring on the units) to help with the learning and change adoption. The technology is very robust and agile. One of our largest challenges is moving from a paper-based/static computer environment o a real-time interactive environment. In many areas of the system we are optimizing the workflows, screen input, and reports of the system. The users have been very patient and professional as we have progressed through the past six months with rapid change and improvements. Overall we are very proud of our accomplishments thus far.
What is next for this project?
After the Miami Valley Hospital implementation, we took a number of lessons learned and built them into our implementation schedule. We are implementing the registration, patient billing, and health information management applications as well as a technology upgrade later this year. In addition, we are implementing the technology at Good Samaritan Hospital, the new Atrium Medical Center (which will replace Middletown Regional Hospital), and Miami Valley South Health Center. The schedule is still being refined out at this time. We will also expand our clinical device integration, physician order entry, and medical documentation, and ePrescribing capabilities over the next few years.
What else has Premier Health Partners been working on?
We are a very busy organization working on over 100 other projects including routine upgrades, data center improvements, opening two major new facilities - Atrium Medical Center and Miami Valley South Health Center, new cardiology system, smart IV pumps, regulatory improvements, and core infrastructure enhancements.
What is now your IT department's biggest challenge?
Our biggest challenge is demand management and rapid change management. We used to use technologies that were more static and forced a user down a single path. The current technologies are very evidence based, robust, and realtime. They improve our patient safety, quality, and patient outcomes but not without a lot of information, process change, and adjustment to the caregiver workflow.
How can the IT industry better support the health care industry?
I think these the same concerns as most industries - we need to find ways to make our technology last longer so that we are not reinvesting in operating system and current technologies every few years. It is very challenging with limited budget and resources to move forward if we have to re-invest in core infrastructure technologies so frequently. For healthcare-specific applications, the lack of standards and adherence to standards makes interoperability ery challenging. The industry is working on standards with initiatives nationally but they are slow to be agreed upon and adopted by all technology vendors.
