Bill Lewkowski, Executive VP & CIO, Metro Health, Chapter 2

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

Chapter 2



* Competing against big players: to consolidate or not

* Operating during a pending acquisition — “It’s a challenge.”

* Upgrading Epic to “continue to optimize and evolve.”

* Forming a clinically integrated network

* Hosting site — “We’re very proud of our continued innovation.”

* Cutting-edge work with desktop virtualization

* Silicon Valley mentality



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[Editor’s Note: After this interview was held, it was announced that the planned affiliated with Metro Health and Community Health System was terminated. The proposed deal, which had been in the planning phase for two years, had involved the sale of an 80 percent interest in Metro Health. In an announcement, Doyle Hayes, chairman of Metro Health’s board of directors, stated that the two organizations were not able to agree on “important details.”]

Bold Statements

We knew being independent would be very difficult in the long term, especially as you need to improve your value and your cost equation, you need more scale and scope, and being one hospital, it is very difficult to achieve that.

Our culture is very strong. We’re a small organization, we’re very tightly knitted together, we’re very team-based, and we don’t see that changing, and I think that helps keep the focus on the patients and on our future.

Epic just keeps on getting better and they’re expanding their business intelligence and analytics capabilities, their population health capabilities, their interoperability capabilities, and we just want to take advantage of all those things.

You authenticate, and within six to seven seconds, you have your desktop — your desktop, your files, your applications — live and running just like you left them two minutes ago or a half hour ago. And you can get that from anywhere.

Gamble:  I know that in Michigan you have really large organizations — is that something that’s been a challenge in staying somewhat independent?

Lewkowski:  Well, that’s been the reason for our pending acquisition or, I should say, we are getting acquired, but this is a proactive strategic move on Metro’s part. Metro made a decision back a couple of years ago that we knew being independent would be very difficult in the long term, especially as you need to improve your value and your cost equation, you need more scale and scope, and being one hospital, it is very difficult to achieve that. And also, to move into population management, you need an expanded base of a population to compete against some of the other players that are growing and growing. There’s a lot of consolidation going on.

So the board made the decision. Metro is a very, very strong organization. We’re financially strong, we are independent, we are technically at the top of the game and our ...