Jake Dorst, CIO, Tahoe Forest District Hospital, Chapter 2

One of the most important characteristics for a strong leader is being able to stay calm when the organization hits rough waters. For Jake Dorst — who has survived tumultuous times during his career, including acquisitions and difficult go-lives — the ultimate test came less than a year into his tenure at Tahoe Forest Hospital District, when he was asked to serve as interim CEO. And although he learned quite a bit from the experience, he’s happy to be back in the CIO shoes that seem to fit him so well.

In this interview, Dorst talks about how his team is preparing for an Epic go-live (and why they chose to partner with Mercy Health’s IT services arm), why they’re focusing on “Population Wellness” rather than population health, the challenges of being located in a resort area, and why it’s essential to have a strong project manager. He also discusses why Tahoe Forest appealed to him, his “servant leadership” philosophy, and what it was like to move across the country with young children.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* Tapping into Silicon Valley

* Tracking wearables data with Blue Life

* “Population Wellness”

* Chief information & innovation officer role

* “If you put the patient first, you’re going to do okay.”

* Mercy’s virtual health offerings

* Telemedicine for cancer care



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Bold Statements

We were able to risk stratify through claims data, biometric screening, and up-to-the-minute wearable data to do what we call ‘Population Wellness.’ It’s not really population health; it’s a lot of the low-hanging fruit that I think gets bypassed in the population health world, where they dive right into genomics and you have to hire data scientists.

When you’re talking about innovation, a lot of times it involves this new world of data science and big data and all the buzzwords that drive me nuts — machine learning, artificial intelligence. My question is, how effective is it?

If you put the patient first, you’re going to do okay. This is a play to make the patient first; to put their records all in one place, make it easy for them to get treatment here and elsewhere, and give our physicians, nurses and caregivers the best tools that they can have to get a longitudinal look at what’s going on with the particular person.

One of the doctors said, ‘if we could come up with a way to do that at home, that would be great.’ That’s where that rural health and research comes into play. It’s one of the things that really intrigued me when I was interviewing for this position — that this organization would put money towards those types of things.

Gamble:  Looking down the road, once you have that unified record in place, I imagine you start looking at initiatives like population health or anything that’s going to be made easier by having that unified record.

Dorst:  Yes, and we’re doing a lot of that here now. We’ve started a program called Blue Life based on Blue Zones — the predominant color here up in Tahoe area is blue. People identify with that color. We found one of the benefits of working here is its proximity to Silicon Valley. There are a lot of younger semi-retired folks or fully retired folks that live up here and still have a lot of work left in them. We came across a startup here that was doing wearable technologies and had created a mobile-first social platform.

He approached us about how we could use it for the hospital, and so we actually built a product with him for our own self-insured folks to track health insurance information, live, up-to-date information from Fitbits and wearables,