Daryl Kallevig, CIO, Riverwood Healthcare Center, Chapter 3

We often hear about the disadvantages of being a small, rural organization: smaller budgets, challenges recruiting top IT talent, and sometimes, a poor telecommunications infrastructure. What often gets lost in the shuffle are the benefits, one of which is being able to know every staff member, which can help leaders to better understand what keeps everything ticking, says Daryl Kallevig. In this interview, he talks about partnering with Allina Health to implement Epic, the workflow redesign required when switching EHRs, and strategy he used to communicate with his team during the rollout process. Kallevig also talks about why patient engagement is critical for rural facilities, what his team is doing stay “on top of our game,” and his interesting career path.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3



* Epic’s patient portal

* Being an underserved telecom area — “We’re waiting on vendors to build out the fiber infrastructure.”

* Recruiting challenges — “It’s a tough game in northern Minnesota.”

* Healthcare since 1983, IT since early 70s

* Time with Stanford & Mayo Clinic

* “I enjoy smaller organizations because they’re very family-oriented.”

* CIOs at a smaller org — “I have to wear a lot of hats.



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Bold Statements

It’s all copper-based at this point, no fiber, so we’re really throttled from that perspective. We’re waiting for a couple of other vendors that are in the area to bring in fiber and build out fiber infrastructure within our area much more than what’s available to us now.

I’ve been trying to advertise for a network server engineer for a year and a half. Over that time, I’ve only gotten four applicants, none of which were really qualified. So it is a tough game out here in northern Minnesota to be able to recruit IT talent.

That’s part of what makes the job interesting — to have the ability to touch so much more and be so much more involved in some of the clinical areas like radiology and pharmacy. You get much closer to the day-to-day activities in those departments than in large organizations, so you really learn and understand a lot more.

That does happen quite a bit here where there are individuals where we encourage them to pursue, for example, maybe an RN license. What I will do with this open position is take one of my desktop technician staff and send them to school to be a server network engineer.

Gamble:  I imagine you have a portal setup or are looking to do that?

Kallevig:  Yes, we have Epic’s ad a portal. We’ve gotten some extremely good comments from that. We get fairly good utilization of it, but Aitkin County in Minnesota is what’s termed one of the most underserved telecommunications counties in the US. We have a lot of rock and stuff, so it’s hard to build infrastructure within the area here in northern Minnesota.

Gamble:  Right. So that’s an ongoing challenge as far as making sure that people can access systems?

Kallevig:  Right.

Gamble:  Is that something that goes through government as far as getting the infrastructure in there?

Kallevig:  There are telecommunication grants that are provided by the federal government, as well as the state of Minnesota, to help build out that infrastructure. I would say there probably aren’t enough dollars available, and it does take time to build out that infrastructure too. So when we talk about telecommunications here in Aitkin, I really only have two local vendors that I can go to,