Brian Tew, VP & CIO, Greater Hudson Valley Health System, Chapter 2

When Brian Tew arrived at Greater Hudson Valley Health System two years ago — as the organization’s third CIO in 3 years — he knew he had his work cut out. But despite the fact that 40 percent of the IT positions were vacant, Tew knew that the core group in place was strong; what they needed was some stability. And so he was deliberate in his approach, building a leadership team from the ground up and improving processes one at a time. Within 20 months, GHVHS had achieved HIMSS Stage 7  recognition, and Tew’s plans don’t stop there. In this interview, he talks about what it took to change the organization’s mentality, the challenge of “keeping the lights on” while developing standards and setting up committees, the biggest priorities he hopes to tackle, and why managing expectations is absolutely critical.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* Managing expectations — “That was key.”

* Leadership, then governance

* “We didn’t have the basic things in place.”

* Creating service level agreements

* The prioritization challenge

* Daily huddles

* 3rd CIO in 3 years

* Gaining credibility & buy-in — “We had to do what we said we were going to do.”



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Bold Statements

I didn’t want to meet with the physician committees or anything until I was ready to be able to deliver and be able to meet their needs. And so I put on hold a lot of the governance piece of my job just so that I can build the team and just do the basic blocking and tackling that IT department has to do.

If you were to ask my staff what was the biggest issue two years ago, they would tell you that it was prioritization of projects. And so we deferred to them for the first 10 months or so of prioritizing the initiatives and the projects that they had. Once leadership was in place and we would have our daily huddles, that helped the process.

If you’re the third CIO in three years, your boss and the other senior leadership team are going to make sure you’re successful. They’ve gone through the pain of no leadership with a department that is so interwoven to what they do day in and day out that they’re going to do whatever that it takes to make you successful.

Morale was down. So I had to give them some sense of focus on, ‘this is my approach, here’s the direction we’re going to take, here’s the plan.’ And I was fully engaging them through the process, making sure that they were buying in to the vision.

Gamble:  In building this team, I imagine it was interesting because there was really so much that needed to happen right away. What was the kind of the strategy there just as far as like get the right people in the place and then like let’s focus on optimizing the EHR or how did that kind of go?

Tew:  One of the things that I have to focus on every day is managing expectations. That was key here, because I didn’t want to meet with the physician committees or anything until I was ready to be able to deliver and be able to meet their needs. And so I put on hold a lot of the governance piece of my job just so that I can build the team and just do the basic blocking and tackling that IT department has to do. 

We really didn’t have any type of standards or processes when it comes to incident management and change management. So we brought in some idle standards and those are the things that I was focusing on really for the first year before I started to develop the physician advisory committees, the IT steering committees, and all the other workgroups. The workgroups existed before I arrived, and they continued, and we actually added on them. But as far as the strategic committees,