Edith Dees, President & CEO, CAPSYN (Former Longtime CIO), Chapter 2

Is change really so bad? Can implementing a new system really shake a staff to its core, paralyzing the ability to provide the best care? Yes, and that’s why it has to be handled with extreme care, says Edith Dees. Of all the lessons she learned during her two decades as CIO, the most valuable was how to effectively introduce and manage change. In this interview, Dees reflects on her experiences — not just as an IT leader, but as a clinician and consultant — and shares how she was able to conquer some of the biggest roadblocks in advancing an organization. She also talks about what excites her most in today’s industry, why she made to the move to consulting, and the direction she believes the CIO will take.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* CIO role at St. Mary’s

* Maine’s “very progressive PC physicians”

* Replacing legacy systems — “It was at the tipping point.”

* Merging 3 systems into 1 with SMS

* The “consultant glow”

* Early career as ICU nurse — “Each alarm meant something to me. I get that.”



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Bold Statements

Everybody that’s impacted by it needs to be able to tell themselves that. ‘That’s why we’re doing this,’ to remind themselves. With the HIE, we can cut costs, we can speed care. That’s why we need to do this.

Not every organization embraces change. Some leaders have more of an appetite for it than others, and it’s kind of like, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’

Any time you get a situation with a merger or an acquisition, everybody has so much pride. It’s the ‘you’re killing my baby’ analogy with what they’ve done what they accomplished. It’s hard to let go and say that whatever those successes are that brought us here, we can use those skills and talents to take us somewhere else.

That’s what outsourcing brought. It brought some outside perspectives, it brought stability, it brought methodology, and it brought ownership and accountability. What I liked about it is you had 100 percent executive support because they finally said, ‘We need help and we’re willing to pay for it.’

I understand with probably much deeper appreciation as an IT professional than I did as a nurse how interdependent the different groups are in healthcare — what are the handoffs, what do you need from me, what do I need from you? When I was a nurse, I just did what I did.

Gamble:  It’s interesting to think about how Meaningful Use really changed the outlook of the industry, even though a lot of people talk about stage 1 really laying a foundation and being what so many organizations were already striving for or doing, and how stage 2 really ramped things up and challenged a lot of organizations.

Dees:  I think it was really good for us to do the 1-2 where didn’t have a chance to deaccelerate and we still had all our engine steam going. Because typically, from my experience, after you do a big deal, you want a break; you want to rest a little bit. And if you’re thinking there was going to be a rest between stage 1 and stage 2, I think that may have disciplined a lot of people.

And Stage 2 was more aggressive than stage 1, because stage 1, in my opinion, involved things that were pretty much within the organization’s control. Stage 2 didn’t. You had to collaborate with competitors in your HIE. You had to support, cajole, and encourage your patients to come forward and use your portal and send you emails. It’s hard enough to control your own workforce — now you’ve got folks that you have no direct influence over.

But again, it’s like any change — why are we doing this? We’re doing it to make things better and everybody that’s impa...