George Hickman, EVP & CIO, Albany Medical Center, Chapter 2

Whenever an organization’s core vendor is acquired, there’s going to be some trepidation. But when a CIO has the opportunity to sit down with leaders and talk about the intended roadmap, those fears can be quickly assuaged — especially when that group includes John Glaser and Kent Gale. In this interview, veteran CIO George Hickman discusses his feelings on the Siemens-Cerner merger, why his organization is happy to serve as a reference site, and what has helped NY’s HIE remain successful. He also talks about the prioritization challenges facing CIOs (which he handles using a Ouija board), the “Henry Kissinger skills” he picked up as a consultant, and the road that took him to Albany.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* Playing “the giving back role” as a reference site

* Serving on the MedAllies board

* SHIN-NY (NY’s HIE)

* Connectivity standards — “We’re seeing the march continue”

* Pilot for ONC direct standard in 2009

* “Heroic effort” required to meet MU

* Patient engagement in acute vs ambulatory



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Bold Statements

You want your vendor partners to be successful. Sometimes you drag each other through things kicking and screaming, but in the end it’s about all parties being successful, because if they’re not successful in the longer haul, we’re not going to be.

I also would have to credit the work in the communities, because that is where the HIE and the RHIOs in the state of New York have been stood up. And they are the base infrastructure to the state-wide network because without the hubs that are sitting in the regions to connect to one another, there really isn’t a state-wide network.

It’s my hope that within a year, the vendor industry will have caught up and all of the EHRs will be able to do a full direct exchange.

It wasn’t without some heroic effort along the way, including a lot of intense energy between us and our vendor community to assure that certain functions were delivered in a time frame that we could still get to the starting line as of October.

People who are getting toward the end of a hospitalization or even coming in at the beginning of the hospitalization are not necessarily thinking at that time about going home and logging into a portal to look up everything that happened.

Gamble:  As far as being a reference site or hosting the site visits, is that something that helps you? What are your thoughts on that?

Hickman:  There are different ways to look at the feeling of playing that role. We were asked to play the role for a good time before we said yes. I can give you a couple of examples, actually. One example would be that when we did our development for evidence-based medicine, the medication order sets for pediatrics — which in our case includes kids who are PICU kids or babies that are neonates, and are in some cases, more than unusually, hypersensitive to drug dosing and those sorts of concerns.

There was a tremendous amount of effort and care given to build those order sets. We then built that out well using the Soarian suite and of course have maintained it along that line. We found, because the word got out, that other Soarian customers were talking to us about that and even asking if they could acquire that content from us to help them with their own builds. And so we’ve played that sort of giving back role, which is the other point to be made.

The other example would be the Soarian financials implementation. We had bought Siemens (now Cerner), and I think they still refer to it as the cleanest Soarian financials go-live in their history, cleanest meaning no lift to accounts receivable by the effor...