Dan Howard, Site CIO, Loma Linda University Health, Chapter 2

As site CIO at Loma Linda University Health, Dan Howard’s goal is to strike the right balance between helping facilities meet their individual needs while ensuring that they align with the health system’s overall strategy: kind of like the old bumper sticker saying, ‘Think locally, act globally.’ Not an easy job, but one he hopes to accomplish, particularly as the industry transitions toward a value-based reimbursement model. In this interview, Howard talks about how Epic CareConnect is helping to position the organization for population health, why hospitals sometimes need to act more like a vendor, and how payer incentives are changing the game. Howard also talks about how he’s able to leverage his experience in project management, and the question CIOs should constantly be asking.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* Rolling out Epic’s CareConnect to manage patients across the continuum

* Offering a mobile, “nimble” tool for patients

* Eye on predictive analytics

* Benefits of project management training

* 30,000-ft view versus “in the weeds”

* IS as a “value accelerator”

* Communicating with execs — “They’re looking for expert opinion and advice.”



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Bold Statements

Pushing out CareConnect is helping because now we’re at least going to have the ability to look at that patient information, look at a single database, and see if they were seen at any of these other tertiary facilities, and that makes it easier for managing care across the continuum.

What we want to focus on initially is looking at comorbidities and disease registries and being able to look at statistics and determine where are our 30-day readmissions, what are we commonly seeing, and how quickly can we get in there with care coordinators and do interventions before that person shows back up to the ED.

It gives me a real foundation of understanding the basics of project management in terms of communication, but then being able to look at a project charter or looking at a stakeholder sheet and understand how that workflow goes through an organization and be able to keep individuals on task and make sure that things are delivered on time, within the scope, and within budget.

If you can come in there and easily explain to them in layman’s terms what the objectives are and show them from an infrastructure perspective or an IS perspective of how we can help you meet those goals and provide some structure to that and some priority around it, that makes our jobs a lot easier.

Gamble:  What else are you really looking at right now as far as the really big initiatives?

Howard:  I think for Loma Linda obviously population health is one of our biggest initiatives, and so doing our CareConnect initiatives is sort of meeting one of those metrics that we have. Within the San Bernardino-Riverside County, Inland Empire region that we serve, we have a large managed care HMO provider called IEHP, and there’s about 1.3 million lives at risk. Loma Linda sees a lot of those patients, and some of the partner hospitals we’ve been working with see the same demographic. And so pushing out CareConnect is helping with that population health because now we’re at least going to have the ability to look at that patient information, look at a single database, and see if they were seen at any of these other tertiary facilities, and that makes it easier for managing that care across the continuum, across these different organizations. That’s huge for us.

We are looking to do more with My Chart and Healthy Planet with Epic to be a little bit more proactive on the population health side and give patients the a...