Health IT Influencers: Encore Co-founder & Former CEO Dana Sellers, Chapter 1

We often hear people say, ‘timing is everything.’ For Dana Sellers, that seemed to be the case, as she co-founded two companies — Trinity Computing and Encore Resources — at the time when they were most needed in the industry. But while timing is certainly important, it’s not everything. During her career, which spanned more than three decades, Sellers demonstrated an uncanny knack for leveraging her knowledge and industry relationships to be able to anticipate what’s coming down the pike.

Recently, healthsystemCIO.com spoke with Sellers about the risky move of starting a company during a financial downturn, her strategy when it comes to identifying top talent, why strong governance is essential, and what she considers to be the key challenges – and opportunities – for CIOs.

Chapter 1



* “I’m a chemical engineer by training

* Starting Trinity Computing – “We didn’t know we were pioneers; we just thought it sounded like a good idea.”

* Goal to be 100% referenceable

* Consulting with Healthlink – “I loved working with clients.”

* 20 years working with Ivo Nelson

* Leaving IBM to start Encore

* I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be fun to do it one more time?”

* Fortuitous timing with ARRA



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Bold Statements

We were both still in our 20s, and we didn’t know what we didn’t know. And so we learned everything as we went. We didn’t even know we were that cutting edge. We didn’t know we were pioneers; we just thought it sounded like a good idea.

We said, ‘you know what? 100 percent may not be achievable. Someday, we may meet that customer we just can’t make happy, but that’s our goal. We’re not going to back off of it. We’re going to communicate it to our people, and we’re going to do everything we can to achieve it.’

Every time I would go out and meet with a client, I’d learn something from them. I enjoyed hearing about their challenges and their problems because, as an engineer, I love solving problems. Each time, I felt like I came away smarter.

I just knew that I wanted to get back into a small consulting environment, and we were very fortunate that, all of a sudden, there was this additional impetus for the industry to really do some important things.

The strategy we settled on was that we’ll grow as fast as the market wants us to, but within the constraints of that 100 percent referenceability. We’ll never go so fast that we can’t make our clients happy.

Gamble:  I think the best place to start is to get some background on your career. What was your first foray into healthcare?

Sellers:  I’m a chemical engineer by training, and I started my career with IBM. I worked in a part of IBM that sold large mainframe computers to the oil industry. I worked with an individual named Jim Pritchett whose family had a company that was in the healthcare field. One day, before the IBM PC even existed, Jim came to me and said, ‘hospitals are big users of technology. They use mainframes to send out bills and do patient accounting, but there’s hardly any automation in the specialized departments of a hospital like cardiology or radiology.’ Those areas hadn’t really been automated yet. In every other industry, automation had gone out to the end user, but not in healthcare.

We talked about it, and we concluded that part of the reason healthcare hadn’t adopted technology in the specialized departments was that the mainframes weren’t very well-suited. We saw the emergence of personal computers and we said, ‘let’s start a company that uses personal computers to do specialized things for departments in hospitals.’ We knew that the IBM PC was coming soon, so we thought, ‘that’ll legitimize it and we’ll be in the right place at the right time.