Denni McColm, CIO, Citizens Memorial Healthcare, Chapter 1

Sometimes, a quick glace is all you need. And then other times, it only gives part of the story. That’s precisely the case with Citizens Memorial, which appears to be an 86-bed rural facility, but in reality is an integrated health network that includes 650 long-term beds and a growing base of clinics. It was also the first rural health system to achieve HIMSS Stage 7, and one of the first small systems to achieve MU Stage 2. So when Denni McColm says her organization has been “ahead of the curve in many areas,” she’s actually being modest. In this interview, she talks about what it takes to foster innovation (particularly on a small budget), the organization’s journey with Meditech (and why they aren’t rushing to implement 6.1), what it’s meant to have the same CEO throughout her long tenure, and why Citizens feels like home.

Chapter 1



* About Citizens Memorial

* Bringing in practices — “We meet them wherever they want to be met.”

* Remaining independent

* Meditech since 2003 — “We’ve been ahead of the curve.”

* Waiting on 6.1 (for now)

* EHR conversion at a large — “It was a huge project”

* An infrastructure that “provides a foundation for growth.”



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Bold Statements

We have had an approach where we would meet the physicians wherever they wanted to be met — whether they wanted to be independent or they wanted to be employed, and over time, it has ended up that almost every provider is employed.

It’s very efficient — reduced clicks, it’s mobile friendly, and our docs are anxious to move to it whenever the time is right. But for us, it’s not quite as pressing as it is for some, because we already have that integration where patient history and everything is at the fingertips of the providers already. So we can afford to wait and make sure that matures a little bit.

We thought that with the CCD, you’re just going to generate a bunch of CCDs on one side and plug them in on the other side, but the format of the CCD is so horrible, and we really had to strip out so much of what was in it because it was just hundreds of pages per patient.

One of the nice things about the infrastructure that we’ve built is that it provides a foundation for growth. And so, when we brought in a dermatologist a few months ago, we just stood up dermatology as a new clinic and voilà, trained him on the system and moved forward.

Gamble:  Hi Denni, can you please give a little bit of information about Citizens Memorial to kind of get us started off?

McColm:  Citizens Memorial is what I would call a rural healthcare system. We’re located in southwest Missouri, and we started actually before I worked here in 1982 — the hospital opened with just 52 beds and had three doctors at that time, and was the only game in town for healthcare.

We have since grown to become an integrated health network, including the hospital and emergency services. We operate ambulance services, we have home care services including skilled nursing, rehab, hospice, home medical equipment, homemaker chore services, and health transit. We’ve also expanded into long-term care, we started doing that in the late 80s, and we now have 650 long-term care beds at six different long-term care facilities. We have some independent living, some residential care and then we also have physician practices. We have some certified rural health clinics and walk-in clinics, and we have been able to grow our specialty base very nicely. We really have a broad variety of services for the community. Even in some areas where we didn’t have the expertise to do it ourselves, like cancer care or dialysis, we partnered with others to come in and bring those services to the community.

It’s quite a story. We’ve had the same CEO, Donald J.