Brian Thomas, VP & CIO, Swope Health Services, Chapter 2

When an opportunity presents itself, smart people jump on it. For Brian Thomas, that moment came a few years ago when Swope Health Services was restructuring its executive team. Seeking to learn more about the business, Thomas asked to take on a 90-day assignment as interim VP of operations, and in doing so, impressed the board enough to earn a new title. In this interview, Thomas talks about what he believes it takes to become a successful CIO, why leaders must “get in the trenches” to better understand user needs, and his philosophy when it comes to innovation. He also talks about how his team is preparing for the ACO world, the dangers of over-customization, and the strong foundation he was able to build during his time with the Marines.



Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* Building an EDW to support accountable care

* Interim role as VP of operations — “It helped me to understand the business even more.”

* Need for agility with long-term plans

* His innovation philosophy

* “Sometimes the big shiny object comes with a big price.”

* Assessing contracts

* “We need to treat vendors as strategic partners.”



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Bold Statements

It was certainly something new for me. It was a challenge, and it definitely pushed me to some limits at some points, but there was great growth there. And because of that, I’m where I am today.

If you really want to be a successful CIO, you’ve got to get in and learn your customer’s business, and this has given me that opportunity to learn so much more about the business. Just stretching yourself really gives you that growth you need from a leadership perspective.

Technology touches everything, and in order to be more successful as a CIO, you need to understand the business inside and out. You can’t just rely on your CEO or your COO or your CFO to say, ‘we’re going to make these widgets for the next six years.’

You have to look at what’s available today that won’t break the bank. In some cases, it’s just a matter of redesigning your workflow, not necessarily a technology. But what we found is that to stay innovative, we’ve got to be looking outside the organization a lot of times just to see what is available.

I have a fiscal responsibility to the organization to review them, and so I went through all the contracts, starting with the largest ones. I wanted to ensure that we were getting the best value for our dollar. In a lot of cases, I was able to renegotiate several of these contracts for multi-year savings.

Gamble:  What about accountable care — are you involved in any ACOs right now or is that something that you’re looking at?

Thomas:  Yes. We are part of an ACO here in Missouri. Around the time we had joined the ACO, population health was in our strategic plan. We had started to build an enterprise data warehouse so we could better support the ACO and our strategy going forward for managing our population’s health. So that has been a great learning experience for me, obviously, but it has truly helped our patients and the overall quality of care that’s provided. It’s really been an eye-opener, so I’m pretty excited about it. We’re still in the middle of it, but we’ve come a long way.

Gamble:  How long has the enterprise data warehouse been in the works?

Thomas:  Two years now. We’ve gleaned a lot of information and data out of that system in meaningful reports. What’s exciting for me is we had a bottleneck with a report writer providing pivot tables and Excel spreadsheets, and now we’re able to push this data out in real-time to all of our cus...