Jennifer Laughlin Mueller, CIO, Watertown Regional Medical Center, Chapter 1

If you ask Jennifer Laughlin Mueller how she achieved her career goals, she’ll tell you that it was through hard work, taking advantage of golden opportunities, and being visible. “You say yes to things you might not know anything about,” says Mueller, who has learned a tremendous amount during her 17 years at Watertown. In this interview, she talks about the major changes her organization faces with a recent affiliation to LifePoint Health — and how her team is already leveraging its resources; how physician engagement has evolved from “arm-twisting” to a true partnership; and her vision for state HIEs. Mueller also shares the advice she’d like to give all young women, the attributes she values most in aspiring leaders, and the conversation with a CEO that was a career-defining moment.

Chapter 1



* About Watertown Regional MC

* Affiliating with LifePoint — “We’re trying to feel our way through the transition.”

* Upgrading to Meditech C/S 5.6.7

* Optimization visits

* Establishing governance structure & processes

* Physician IT advisor as a “liaison”



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Bold Statements

We are working to establish a governance process or structure in order to start prioritizing and figuring out where’s the low-hanging fruit, what can we do fairly quickly, and who’s going to do it. That’s a big project.

We’re in the spot now that I would describe it as a bit of chaos, because many providers are utilizing the system in many different ways. We need to get back to what’s the best practice and establish workflows and get back to the elbows of the providers and train and implement a little more consistency.

If you don’t clean up the workflow, it doesn’t really matter what EMR system you have in place, it’s going to be chaotic. I’m hoping that by streamlining and structuring this, we will be able to raise the satisfaction with the system.

As we get new physicians into our community, they would never go back to paper. It has been great seeing that arm-twisting, if you will, is just not necessary anymore.

Gamble:  Hi Jennifer, thank you so much for taking some time to speak with us today.

Mueller:  You’re welcome. I’m glad to be here.

Gamble:  Great. So to give our readers and listeners some information, can you give an overview of Watertown Regional, in terms of where you’re located, number of beds, things like that?

Mueller:  Watertown Regional Medical Center is located in Southeastern Wisconsin. We’re about halfway between Milwaukee and Madison, and about two and a half hours north of Chicago. We are licensed for 95 beds; however, we staff about 55 beds currently at the organization. Just to give you some stats, we have about 1600 admissions, about 19,000 ED visits per year, and 250 births. Most of our volume is really in our clinics. We have 14 clinics spanning most specialties — primary care, ophthalmology, urology, women’s health, orthopedics.  We have a variety of specialties and clinics in our primary and secondary markets. Recently, actually as of September 1, we affiliated with LifePoint Health, and so we’re working through the integration process with their organization as we speak.

Gamble:  So you’re still kind of feeling out how that’s going to work as far as that affiliation?

Mueller:  Yes. Our relationship is brand new, so we’ve had a good time already working with a lot of the folks and incorporating and trying to integrate with them in my role specifically as it relates to IT. I can get into that a little bit later as far as some of the projects we’re working on, but just overall as an organization, we’re just trying feel our way through the transition from a nonprofit organization to a for-profit organization.