David Baker, VP of IT, St. Joseph Health, Chapter 2

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

Chapter 2



* “People before tickets”

* StaffHub’s “modern-day intranet” concept

* From 50 to 40K users in 6 weeks

* Selling “Facebook” to the board — “We know it’s a scary word.”

* Power of knowledge sharing

* A softer approach — “You don’t have to use it, but here’s what you could gain from it.”

* Pushing the envelope



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Bold Statements

I always say, people before tickets. Get in there and see how we can help our folks proactively rather than reactively.

The knowledge sharing was great. It helped us tremendously. But the biggest thing was to listen to the needs of the business. This has got to be almost sold top-down, board-down.

Just by putting this stuff out there under the premise of ‘you don’t have to use it,’ it starts to sell itself. The most successful products are products that people want to use because they instantly see it’s intuitive

I feel like we’re at a tipping point. We’re moving away from the idea of IT as just glorified email and scheduling, and we’re moving into a world where people expect to forge a relationship through technology to enhance and assist with their day as intuitively as possible.

I think our culture is tolerant and expects failure to an extent, because without that you can’t progress. So remove the boundaries of fear, hire great people and let them get on with it.

Gamble:  And is that where you would get ideas for things like UniPrint and solving printing issues — going through focus groups and saying things like, ‘What do you want to see improved?’ Taking that angle?

Baker:  Absolutely. We have operational IT managers at the hospitals whose remit is to engage the end user. Our big drive this year is making IT personal and working out how do we get to the customer before the customer calls the service desk. The traditional model was everything centralized, and I think that’s great from a technology standards point of view. In the application layer and the way we serve up the operating system, it’s a great model being centralized, but it’s such a fast-paced business out on the hospital floor. We work every day with what we call sacred encounters — how do we have those special interactions with patients, and how do we make it a dignified and hopefully fantastic experience in sometimes what’s not always a great situation in healthcare and why you’re in the hospital.

For us, it’s about if we can make the docs’ lives easier and the nurses’ lives easier. My mantra is to get in front of those guys, speak to them if they have time, and see how they’re doing and ask, how’s your day? Our best interactions are those personal ones where the nurse would call one of our engineers as they were walking though and rounding and say, ‘Hey, this is really not working for me. Can you help?’ I always say, people before tickets.