Corey Zeigler, CIO, Fort Drum Regional Health Planning Organization, Chapter 1

If you think your organization has a hard time gaining access to data, trying working with the military. For organizations like Fort Drum, it has long been a struggle to provide clinicians with updated health records of military members because of the firewalls that exist. But finally, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, says Corey Zeigler, whose organization is participating in a pilot that could finally break down those walls. In this interview, he discusses the unique operating model that he believes will position Fort Drum well for the future; the governance challenges that come when hospitals aren’t owned; and how his team is leveraging an HIE to pull together data from multiple EHRs. Zeigler also talks about the organization’s population health journey, his military background, and what it’s like to get outside the four walls of the hospital.

Chapter 1



* FDRHPO’s goal: to “leverage the health system in an around Ft. Drum to take care of soldiers and their families.”

* 150 practices & community-based organizations

* “We’re a centralized, trusted partner.”

* Governed by 3 boards

* HIT initiatives — “We primarily operate through grants.”

* Supporting “heterogeneous environments” in hospitals & clinics

* NY’s HIE landscape



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Bold Statements

The planning organization just brings all those folks together. We’re a centralized, trusted partner. We have no agenda or affiliation with any of the organizations, so we’re able to operate in a unique position to bring folks to the table

The way we kind of look at it is, the med management group is the ‘what,’ so they focus on what we need to do, and then the HIT governance group is the ‘how’ — how are we going to implement this, how are we going to support it.

Through technology, we’ve divided into specialties, subspecialties and even niche specialties, and created all these silos. Hopefully we’re turning the corner with technology where we’re using it to bring it back to a system that can be more patient-centric again and have those providers know everything they need to know

We can do patient queries from other RHIOs. It doesn’t support direct workflow, meaning that if you have a lab in a hospital that’s not in your RHIO, that won’t find its way back to the provider. But a provider can go in and do a query on you.

Gamble:  Hi Corey, thank you so much for taking sometime to speak with healthsystemCIO.com.

Zeigler:  It’s my pleasure.

Gamble:  To get things started, can you talk a little bit about your organization, Fort Drum Regional Health Planning Organization?

Zeigler:  I guess being affiliated with the military you have to have a good acronym list to compete with theirs, but we’re a health planning organization that was put in place specifically when Fort Drum went from what was a National Guard and reserve training base to full active duty, meaning that they had soldiers here year round. So it went from a maybe couple of hundred folks there fulltime to now 40,000 soldiers and family members.

Generally speaking, they would build a hospital there, but there was a conscious decision to leverage the health system in and around Fort Drum to take care of the soldiers and family members. What our organization does is make that into a health system for both the betterment of the community at large, and of course for the soldiers and family members that are stationed here.

Gamble:  And what’s included in that — it’s a collaborative of hospitals?

Zeigler:  Depending on the initiatives that we’re undertaking, we go anywhere from seven down to four hospitals because we’ve got multiple programs that overlay each other. We’ve got an ACO that’s right here in the area that includes six of ou...