Dee Emon, VP & CIO, Wake Forest Baptist Health, Chapter 1

When Dee Emon was promoted to the CIO role at Wake Forest Baptist Health in 2014, it was the first time she held that particular title — but she was no stranger to IT. In fact, Emon — a nurse by training — had spent the past decade with “one foot on each side of the fence.” As a result, she was able to bring to the CIO role an understanding of IT’s role in supporting patient care, something she’s always worked hard to convey to her team. In this interview, Emon talks about the toughest and most rewarding parts of being a CIO, how she has benefited from her experience in quality and performance improvement, and the work her team is doing with patient engagement and population health. She discusses the importance of building a strong network, how she has made cybersecurity education a priority, and what it’s like to work with Chad Eckes.

Chapter 1



* About Wake Forest Baptist

* Epic in acute & ambulatory

* From a traditional EDW to a “data lake strategy”

* Cutting-edge research in regenerative & burn medicine

* Internal & external pop health strategies

* Telemedicine & e-visits: “We’re looking well beyond the portal”

* Working with faith communities & families to engage patients

* “It’s been an interesting evolution.”



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Bold Statements

We’ve moved to a data lake strategy where we’re able to bring in large sets of data, including a lot of genomic and genetic information for our researchers. This allows us to bring that information in an unstructured format, which is different than the way an enterprise data warehouse works.

It’s been a great opportunity for us to broaden the lens of where patients are receiving care and how to best meet their care needs as we can look out into the broader community and start partnering with other healthcare systems.

We are really focusing on not just the patient themselves, but the extended family. How do we, especially for the aging population, ensure that family members are also able to engage with the care providers where appropriate to bring up concerns or work through issues that they may be seeing with their loved ones?

We’re starting to see that pop up again with more concierge, personalized medicine where providers are extending into patients’ homes. I think it’s a great way to see them in their home environment and understand comprehensively what’s going on with the patient.

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

Emon:  Thank you, I’m happy to be here.

Gamble:  To get started, can you give an overview about Wake Forest Baptist Health — what you have in terms of facilities, bed size, and some information about the area?

Emon:  Sure. Wake Forest Baptist is an integrated academic medical center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. We’re located about an hour and a half west of the Raleigh-Durham area. From a facility standpoint, we have three hospitals in our system, with the fourth that will be coming online this July. We have about $2.6 billion in budgeted revenue. In terms of bed size, we run about 1,200 staffed inpatient beds throughout our enterprise, and we have about 300 ambulatory clinics and outreach centers at this point.  From a faculty and physician standpoint, we have close to 2,300 in total right now, and that continues to grow. Our total employee base is about 14,000. We do about 44,000 discharges annually — about the same in surgeries, and we run about 160,000 ED visits throughout our enterprise every year.

Gamble:  Do you serve a pretty large geographic area?

Emon:  We do. We serve about 2.5 million residents, and on the ambulatory side, we have about 1.25 million patient visits a year.