Jason Bray, CIO, McAlester Regional Health Center, Chapter 2

It’s hard to find three organizations as different as those in which Jason Bray has served as CIO. He went from a teaching facility that was on the ground floor of the Meaningful Use movement (Oklahoma State University Medical Center) to a multi-hospital health system that embarked on a massive EHR implementation (Methodist Health System), to a rural hospital that is piecing together an integration strategy (McAlester Regional Health Center). In this interview, Bray opens up about how he has benefited from his experiences at both OSU and Methodist (as well as IBM), and talks about the key priorities on his plate at McAlester, from migrating to a Web-based Meditech platform to expanding telemedicine.

He also talks about the many hats he must wear as CIO of a rural facility, what he learned from Pam McNutt about vendor management, the “incredible ride” it was being an early ACO at OSU, and the enormous potential he believes Watson holds.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* Staff education on a budget

* VAR & the “One throat to choke” philosophy

* Learning from “CIO rock star” Pam McNutt

* Early success with HIE Beacon Grant: “We proved MU could work”

* Groundbreaking data warehousing & analytics at OSU

* Centralized data: “It’s going to be vital for reporting purposes.”

* IBM Watson & the physician shortage



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Bold Statements

My criteria here is that if there’s somebody in McAlester that can do it, great. If not, we see if there’s somebody in Oklahoma who can do it, and if not, then we go to the region.

She’s probably one of the most intelligent people you’ll ever meet. She can take on multiple things at a time and still be able to delineate proper direction, and that’s a skill that a lot of people don’t have. And then on top of that, there’s her understanding of the financial and the political side of the equation.

You’ve got hundreds of systems at your fingertips with valuable data that you’re losing out on because you don’t capture it in a centralized manner.

There’s a lot of discussion around artificial intelligence, but nobody’s even come close to anything like Watson. I still don’t think there’s anything like Watson.

Gamble:  Being a rural organization, one of the things you identified earlier as a challenge is the budget. But is there anything you’re doing to try to educate the staff or promote growth?

Bray:  In my head, yes. When I was trying to get my travel approved for the CHIME-HIMSS conference in March, my CEO asked me, ‘are you just going to this to take a vacation to Vegas?’ And I said, no, this is important from two standpoints. First, I don’t go to CHIME by itself anymore, I go to the combined HIMSS/CHIME conference to save costs. Second, I take Tracy, my second in command, with me, and we split up. He takes certain classes, I take certain classes, and then we talk every night, and come back and report all of that. So my CEO said, ‘I need you to take what you just said in your head and put it down on paper so I know that I’m not just paying $6,000 for you to go to Vegas.’ And I was like, point taken. So I now I make sure to get all of that down.

Gamble:  Sure. I also want to talk about your strategy in terms of vendor management. What are you doing to make sure you’re getting the most out of the contracts you have and that you’re able to really stretch those dollars?

Bray:  One thing I learned thing I learned from my time at Methodist in Dallas working under [CIO] Pam McNutt was about VARs — value-added resources. We had certain criteria in Dallas where they had e...