Brian Sterud, VP of IT & CIO, Faith Regional Health Services, Chapter 1

When Brian Sterud meets with his staff, he often asks two questions: “What can we do to make this more productive,” and “What did we not do well enough?” Not just because continuous improvement is a key priority for the organization, but because it provides a platform for construction criticism, something he feels is crucial. In this interview, Sterud talks about the momentous decision his team is about to embark upon, why switching from one EHR system to another is almost more difficult than going from paper to electronic, the “sense of urgency” across the industry to beef up security, and the “holy grail” when it comes to portal adoption. He also talks about the enormous impact CHIME Boot Camp has had on his professional growth, and the characteristics CIOs need to have going forward.

Chapter 1



* About Faith Regional

* Being independent — “From an IT perspective, it’s incredible.”

* Soarian in the hospital, NextGen in clinics

* EHR evaluation process in Q1 2016 — “We’re exploring our options.”

* Data flow between hospital & clinics

* Biggest MU 2 hurdles

* Leveraging MobileMD to hit thresholds



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Bold Statements

The advantage is that all the decisions are made here. We are able to act quickly and we can be very agile. We have the ability to control our own fate and have the input that we need and the autonomy that we need to be successful.

You want to make sure that you fully vet out all the options because that’s not a decision that you take lightly, and not a decision that you would change direction on in a short amount of time. So you need to do your due diligence and make sure that you’re making the appropriate decision.

There’s definitely more work that we could do. But given the feeling we’ll probably end up on a platform that has a unified database among the ambulatory and inpatient environment, we’ve put a hold on some of that because we feel like we’ll be making a decision that may negate that work.

We’ve been able to work with patients while they’re here and implement some strategies that have allowed us to be in a really good position where we have 20 percent on our view, download, transmit. I don’t know exactly where the rest of the country is, but I would imagine 20 percent would be fairly positive relative to our peers.

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

Sterud:  Hello. My pleasure.

Gamble:  To give our listeners a little bit of an idea, can you just talk about Faith Regional Health Services — what you have in terms of bed size, ambulatory services, where you’re located, things like that.

Sterud:  We’re located in Northeast Nebraska, in Norfolk, Nebraska. We are a 227-bed hospital but we have a full continuum of care. We have actually two campuses in Norfolk as a result of a merger a number of years back, and we primarily operate on one of those two campuses. We have about 26 clinics and own physician practices; 10 of those are scattered around northeast Nebraska in our service area. We run the full gamut, cradle to grave with births, and we have a nursing home, an assisted living, home health, and hospice. So we really have a nice combination of services and offer quite a few services that I think many in our type of organization may not offer as far as being in a community of about 25,000 people.

Our service area geographically expands to the west quite a ways. We actually cover probably over 100,000 lives in our service area. We have heart program and a cancer program, and those are types of things that might make us a little bit unique as far as relative to other facilities that are maybe our size or in similar-sized cities.

Gamble:  And you’re an independent hospital,