David Baker, VP of IT, St. Joseph Health, Chapter 1

At St. Joseph Health, a primary focus across the organization is to give time back to clinicians by improving flow and ease of use. And to the IT department at the 16-hospital system, that has meant transforming the way they interact with care providers, and adopting the mantra of ‘people before tickets,’ according to David Baker. In this interview, he talks some of his team’s key initiatives, including efforts to standardize all of the hospitals to the same version of Meditech, create a platform to facilitate better communication among the staff, and move toward a virtualized environment. Baker also discusses the importance of leadership buy-in with any project, why it’s critical to push the boundaries, and the unique path that took him to his current role.

Chapter 1



* About St. Joseph Health

* Standardizing 16 hospitals to 5.6.5 — “It’s been a long journey, but it’s been necessary.”

* 80-15-5 formula

* Virtualization with Citrix, Imprivata & UniPrint

* Rebranded IT approach — “What do you want to see from an IT system?”

* Getting feedback from users on the floor

* “Entrepreneurial spirit” at St. Joseph



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Bold Statements

It’s really taking any of the headache and the thought process out of getting into the applications you need to best serve the patient so can spend time with the patient. I think we’ve done a good job at giving caregivers back time in their day.

Rather than us trying to ram an IT project into the business and say, ‘use it, this will make your life better,’ it was a case of turning it around, rebranding it, and saying, ‘what would you want to see from an IT system?’

I’m really pleased that we’ve got the foundation, because now is really the time we focus on the fun stuff of improving the workflows, the user experience, the interfaces — the stuff that’s really going to revolutionize healthcare.

They’re used to getting what they want in seconds, and sometimes they’re like, ‘why can’t we do this at work?’ So our aim is to make it as easy as possible at work and align them with their home application stack, which is very intuitive.

Gamble:  Hi David, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today.

Baker:  Sure, I’m glad to be here.

Gamble:  So to give our readers and listeners just a little bit of an idea, can you just talk a bit about St. Joseph Health — what you have in terms of hospitals and ambulatory care and where you’re located?

Baker:  Sure. We are Orange County, California’s largest healthcare provider. We have a total of 16 acute care hospitals and they’re spread between southern California and northern California, and west Texas. We have about 152 ambulatory facilities as well.

I’m the vice president for IT and my responsibilities incorporate what I would call the end user experience ultimately. I look after all of the desktop guys around in the fields, supporting our caregivers — the first line responders, the service desk scout in Texas, and then we do some really interesting stuff with our capsule projects which involve a lot of research and development and some of the fun new technologies we get to pilot internally and then eventually deploy.

Gamble:  And approximately what size of IT staff are you dealing with?

Baker:  Our IT staff is currently about 240, and we have several other businesses through our group with various other contract resources. There’s probably a healthy balance of about 100-plus contract resources on top of the core group.

Gamble:  Are you mostly in California or do you travel among the sites?

Baker:  The IT corporate office is based down in Anaheim, California. We have a corporate office in Irvine, and I travel relatively extensively,