Bill Lewkowski, Executive VP & CIO, Metro Health, Chapter 1

Most leaders would like to think their organization is well-positioned for the future. But when your health system had the foresight to bring in futurists more than a decade ago to design a campus around the concept of patient-centric care, there’s no doubt about it. In this interview, Bill Lewkowski discusses the vision his team has and how they’re working to make it a reality, from building a clinical integrated network to viewing analytics as a core strategy. He also talks about the challenge of keeping the team focused during a pending acquisition (which eventually fell through), his plans bold plans with Epic, the cutting-edge work they’ve done with virtualization, and why it all comes down to having the right people.

Chapter 1



* About Metro Health

* New campus to enable consumer-centric care

* Epic in hospitals & practices

* MyMetro portal

* Clinically integrated network — “Our strategy is one of integration”

* Centralizing reporting & analytics

* “Guiding principles” for success with Great Lakes Health Connect



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Bold Statements

We saw the consumer being the center of the world even back then, and that’s what’s happened. So with everything we did, we wanted to make sure that the experience and the perspective absolutely have the consumer in the center.

We look at the business intelligence and analytics as the heart of all that we’re doing so that we can become much more data-driven and do a better job around all that we do with better analysis.

We had some guiding principles that have paid off down the road. One of those was that we would not take grant money or governmental money. This needed to be self-sustainable.

We don’t look at the HIE as the one source. We can connect directly with other Epic organizations and we can connect up with other networks like Surescripts. We can use some of the other emerging interoperable technology, so it all comes together to provide you a really good way of getting information. 

Gamble:  Hi Bill, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today.

Lewkowski:  My pleasure.

Gamble:  So to get some background information for our readers and listeners, can you just talk a little bit about MetroHealth — what you have in terms of bed size, ambulatory care, that kind of thing?

Lewkowski:  MetroHealth is located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in western Michigan. We are a health system; although we have a single hospital, we are a much larger organization around ambulatory and primary care. So we have a primary and secondary care network. We have about 20 different ambulatory sites around the West Michigan area. But we do have an acute care hospital and in fact, we moved into a new hospital and campus about eight years ago. It’s about a 200-acre campus on the suburbs of Grand Rapids, and not only does it have a new state-of-the-art hospital, but it has about 25 other buildings on our campus, all based around providing different types of care and health and even some retail and commercial types of things. So it’s a campus that is a destination for not only healthcare, but a place within our community here.

Gamble:  Okay. And you said that it was about eight years ago?

Lewkowski:  Yeah, it’ll be eight years this September. It’s hard to believe, but that’s when we went live in the new hospital. And we continue to build on our campus, so we may have about 25 buildings now. The ultimate plan is to have somewhere around 35 to 40.

Gamble:  That’s really interesting to me because that seems like pretty forward thinking to have that idea. It’s becoming so big now, that whole idea of treating the whole patient and it seems like you guys are ahead of the curve on that one.