Jennifer Laughlin Mueller, CIO, Watertown Regional Medical Center, Chapter 2

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

Chapter 2



* Challenge with 5 percent rule

* Early MU adopter — “It served us well participating in it.”

* WISHIN “as a hub and spoke”

* 2-factor authentication for remote users

* “We want to make sure we’re protecting patient information.”

* 17 years at Watertown Regional — “I just kept getting more opportunities.”

* Wearing multiple hats



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Bold Statements

The incentives were there to try to get hospitals and physicians to adopt health IT. We had already adopted it back in 1998, so certainly we were not the target demographic for the Meaningful Use program. However, it really served us well participating in it.

Instead of having interfaces directly between our system and all those entities, we’re able to use WISHIN as that hub and spoke. That’s how I describe it. I think WISHIN — and not just them, but any HIE — will be more useful to the providers when it’s embedded into the EMR.

It’s been really great working with LifePoint on this topic because they have so much talent and resources in the whole security and cybersecurity area that it’s really allowing us to shore up our security on our side.

You volunteer for things. You say yes to things that you might not know anything about, but you figure it out. You get the eye of your boss and their boss and the CEO, the board chair, whoever, and that helps.

Gamble:  I imagine having that history put you in a good place for when Meaningful Use started?

Mueller:  Yes, Meaningful Use stage 1, for us, was very easy. We were meeting the measures really without even trying, so that was really good for us. Meaningful Use stage 2 was the same thing — they increased the thresholds on the different criteria and we were meeting them even pretty easy. The one that was a little bit more challenging was needing to have 5 percent of patients send a secure message to providers. That one was a bit more challenging because you’re requiring the patient to take that initiative and send the message. So we had to put people into the clinic waiting rooms and get people to sign up for the portal so that they can send messages. It was the bigger process, but we were able to get there.

With the relaxation of the stage 2 reporting, now we just have to attest that we have the ability to do that, so that’s certainly helpful. But I know in stage 3, at least what I’m seeing is that number jumps up 10 percent, so we have to keep going.

Gamble:  Who did you have going into the clinics? Who was assigned that role?

Mueller:  We had our IT analysts — nurses and IT analysts — and we placed them in our clinics at strategic times. Not all of our clinics, but the ones where the numbers were the lowest.

Gamble:  It’s interesting because you talked about a lot of Stage 1 being about laying a foundat...