Anne Lara, CIO, Union Hospital of Cecil County, Chapter 2

Call it history repeating itself. In the fall of 2013, Anne Lara and her team were knee-deep in plans to become one of just two organizations (at the same) to migrate to Meditech 6.1. A year and a half later, Union Hospital of Cecil County is at it again, paving the way by going live with Meditech’s scribe functionality. In this interview, Lara talks about what it takes to be an early adopter, the biggest hurdles with attesting to stage 2, how her team is partnering with DataMotion to enable direct messaging, and the complexity of HIE when you closely border two states. She also discusses the culture change needed to increase patient engagement, her key concerns as CIO, and why she feels “very positive” about where the industry is headed.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* Success of CRISP — “They listen to the folks that are doing the work on a daily basis.”

* Preparing for ICD-10 & computer-assisted coding

* Improving workflow — “It can be very labor intensive”

* “Fragmented” portals

* Working with AT&T and Vivify to create Bluetooth-enabled kits

* “It has to be a clinical-IT partnership.”



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Bold Statements

They listen, and they listen to the folks that are actually doing the work on a daily basis. They’re getting the requirements from those individuals and prioritizing what they work on next based upon that feedback.

Right now, the workflow is such that coders have to go through lots of documentation in the electronic world to identify the right code for a particular patient when he or she was discharged from the hospital. It can be very labor intensive.

One would have thought when you talk about patient portal, that patients are going love it; that they can’t wait to get in to get their information. That’s not been the case here.

We’re changing things a bit. We’re giving the patient access to information. We’re trying to educate the consumer in terms of all things health and wellness. But that’s going to take a while.

Gamble:  We’ve heard a couple of people talk about CRISP. It seems like it’s one of the more functional HIEs out there. I wonder, what do you think CRISP is doing right?

Lara:  The staff at CRISP do a really good job keeping in touch with the folks that are doing the work on a daily basis. They have a clinical advisory committee, they have a technology advisory committee, and they take the information from those committee members very, very seriously. They’re always looking for ways to improve or provide value added services to their customers — to the hospitals, to the provider base, etc.

The first thing is getting information about patients, and they did that. They accomplished that. They have an event notification service so that for providers that subscribe or even like case managers that subscribe to that, if a patient associated with them is admitted to any of the hospitals within the state of Maryland, they get an event notification that the patient was admitted. They’ve also worked with a number of the hospitals, including us, to help meet the transitions of care via the CCD requirement for Meaningful Use. They’ve set up their own direct trust accounts and things like that.

The other thing they’re doing is they’re working closely with other pieces and parts of the state government. For example, the organization that’s responsible for regulating the healthcare and healthcare services in the state of Maryland, HSCRC, they’re becoming a source of reports for that particular organization, and subsequently,