J.D. Whitlock, CIO, Dayton Children’s Hospital, Chapter 2

When J.D. Whitlock started at Dayton Children’s Hospital back in January, it may have been his first CIO role, but he’s no stranger to healthcare IT — or to leadership roles. And so he expected to face challenges, especially with an organization that’s restructuring to lay the foundation for growth. But he also realized the enormous opportunity it presented to help determine the right strategy going forward.

In this interview, Whitlock discusses the many priorities on his plate, including planning for both an Epic upgrade and infrastructure refresh, and putting the analytics building blocks into place to support population health. He also talks about why he’s happy to engage with clinical leaders when it comes to EHR functionality, how he’s dealing with gaps in cybersecurity knowledge, and the many ways in which he has benefited from his experiences with Mercy Health as well as the U.S. Air Force.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* Partnering with Anthem to cover more lives

* Two-pronged population health strategy

* Focus on analytics – “We’re trying to get up to speed.”

* Microsoft’s BI stack

* Being a small Epic shop – “It’s the same amount of effort whether it’s one hospital or 22 hospitals”

* Dayton’s “visionary CEO”

* Learning the CIO ropes as executive relationship manager with Mercy



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Bold Statements

We just kicked off a project to add supply chain management — that’s a new functionality. It’s a little bit scary, making sure it’s mature enough to do what we need to do with supply chain.

What I see us doing is leveraging Caboodle to get the non-Epic data you can relatively easily get in there — such as cost data and patient satisfaction data — and have that be the main data warehouse.

Certain things are harder and certain things are easier. For example, you don’t have to coordinate between 22 hospitals from a governance perspective. On the other hand, if you need to do an Epic build, it’s the same amount of effort whether you’re doing it for one hospital or 22 hospitals.

Best practice today is to manage data centrally and have good data governance so you all agree on how you’re defining things and where you’re getting the data from, but then have some of the actual analysts sprinkled throughout the organization reporting up through their clinical business leadership.

Gamble:  In terms of clinically integrated network, what do you have in that space?

Whitlock:  We do have a clinical integrated network. It’s about 100 primary care pediatricians, zero of whom are employed by Dayton Children’s. We partner with them. We have an at-risk contract — not fully at risk, but some variation of shared savings — with Anthem for 19,000 kids. That includes the children of our own employees, but is not limited to them. It provides additional commercially insured lives through Anthem. I’ve been told it’s the first of its kind that Anthem is doing in this country for pediatrics.

We’re using Wellcentive to get some of the billing data, depending on the capabilities of the ambulatory EHRs that these pediatricians are on, whether it’s a CCD or something similar, so we can do population health risk profiling and care coordination on that platform. That started before I got here; it was the quickest way to get started.

We’re also looking at how we use Epic Healthy Planet tools. We’re in the middle of building a new building for our primary care group, which is largely a pediatric residency program, along with things like a foster care program and medically complex kids program.