Health IT Influencers: Encore Co-founder & Former CEO Dana Sellers, Chapter 2

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

Chapter 2



* Market research road trips

* Implementing Cerner & Epic before the days of “robust implementation capabilities”

* Lack of expertise in the early days – “We were all trying to figure it out.”

* Starting fresh: “We weren’t just reinventing Healthlink. We needed to be a new company.”

* Relying on team interviews to ensure the right match

* Keys to successful rollout: “I demand strong governance.”

* Getting away from specialized teams



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Bold Statements

Our challenge was, ‘how do we keep up with vendors and match our skills so that we complement what they do, but we that we can also take advantage of what we’ve learned through our experiences?’

If you have to figure it out every time, you’re much more likely to make a mistake that you have to fix. And it’s a lot harder to make a customer happy when you have to fix something, than it is if you do it right from the beginning.

We wanted people who came from different organizations and brought new thinking. We didn’t want to just get stuck in the same way of thinking — ‘We did it this way at Healthlink, therefore we’re going to do it that way at Encore.’

If you get one person who doesn’t match your culture — maybe they think they’re success is more important that the team’s success — it’s like a cancer, and it can affect everyone’s attitude.

People think governance is just a reporting mechanism, but it’s not. It’s the most important way of guiding the project and getting the organization onboard with the changes that have to take place for the project to be successful.

Gamble:  You talked about listening to the market — was that a philosophy throughout your time at Encore?

Sellers:  Yes. If we had a new idea, we would go test it in the market. We wouldn’t just invest in anything. We used the CHIME focus groups, but we also used just personal relationships in the industry. If we were thinking about launching a new consulting service, I’d take a road trip. I’d go and meet with 10 CIOs that I knew, or 10 CFOs, depending on what it was. And I’d say, ‘this is something we’re thinking about doing. Does it make sense?’ We had things that we thought were really good ideas, but they’d say no, and we’d stop right there.

 

Gamble:  I’m sure that was important, since one of the things you had said you looked for was being able to be nimble. Now, in the early days, what were some of the biggest challenges CIOs were facing? I imagine a lot of it involved implementations.

Sellers:  Yes. In those early days, we were doing a lot of Cerner and Epic implementation, and neither company had as robust an implementation capability or methodology or tools as they do now. And so we were inventing methods and trying to apply those to the nex...