David Bensema, MD, CIO, Baptist Health, Chapter 1

As an internal medicine physician, one of the most important lessons David Bensema learned was that if he was going truly engage with a patient, he first needed to establish trust. As CIO, he employs that same strategy to engage with physicians — something that doesn’t always come easy, even for an MD. In this interview, Bensema talks about what has surprised him most during his first year as CIO; the tough part when it comes to creating a task force of the “best and brightest”; and the strategy his team is using to roll out Epic across 7 hospitals. He also discusses why he doesn’t like the word ‘optimization,’ how he keeps the end user’s needs as top priority, and the one thing that needs to change when it comes to CIOs and project planning.

Chapter 1



* About Baptist Health

* 15-month Epic rollout by region

* “We’ll be troubleshooting and making adjustments that are required immediately.”

* Creating & populating Epic record in physician practices

* Staffing for go-live — “We need them present.”

* “I don’t know that we can ever optimize, but we can always improve.”

* Personalization labs



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Bold Statements

The team’s been doing a great job, but we know that there are glitches, and so we want to be able to find that with a very supportive environment and a smaller cadre of patients and staff before we initiate the rest of the rollout.

Being a physician myself, I love seeing when physicians are able to continue in independent practices, and so as we do our Epic implementation, we’re very aware of that and how we support those independent physicians and involve those physicians in the inpatient build.

We need them not only for staffing, because obviously we don’t want to have any impairment of patient care; we want to make sure that the quality and the safety of our patients’ experience is paramount. But we also need them to learn how to use Epic in their clinical settings or in their everyday roles.

‘Optimization’ is not my favorite term because I don’t know that we can ever optimize, but we can always continuously improve. So we’ll apply continuous improvement principles and go live with the next hospitals with the improvements identified in place.

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

Bensema:  My pleasure, Kate. Thank you.

Gamble:  Sure. To give our readers and listeners some information, can you just talk a little bit about Baptist Health — what you have in terms of hospitals, ambulatory care, things like that?

Bensema:  Sure. Baptist Health is a seven hospital system in Kentucky. We cover the breadth of Kentucky, from Paducah in the far west to Corbin in the far southeast. Our hospitals range in size from 100 to 450 beds, with a total of approximately 2,100 acute care beds in the system. We have currently one up-and-running transitional care unit, LTAC, and we have two long-term acute care facilities in Madisonville and Paducah that are going to be going online shortly. We also have a psychiatric unit in our Corbin hospital, and we have approximately 180 ambulatory sites of care, which includes imaging centers, ambulatory surgery centers, physical therapy offices, and also primary and specialty physician offices.

We employ 450 physicians — probably plus 10 by now because it moves so fast — and an additional 250 to 280 non-physician providers, APRNs and PAs. We have 17 currently retail sites in the Wal-Mart supercenters staffed by APRNs; they’re limited service clinics. We also have approximately six urgent care centers in the Louisville, Kentuckiana region and two additional in the Lexington/Richmond area and one in Paducah. So we cover the full spectrum.