Jim Noga, CIO, Partners HealthCare, Chapter 2

“Change is hard. It’s always hard.”

One of the most important lessons Jim Noga has learned during his 17 years in health IT leadership is that no matter how much education and planning go into a project, there will be a period of adjustment — and there’s no way leaders can avoid it. What they can do, however, is take steps to ease the burden. When Partners embarked on a five-year initiative to implement Epic across the system, Noga made sure that various stakeholders were at the table, providing input. The goal was to have a system that didn’t just meet the needs of clinicians, but all users — including patients.

In this interview, he talks how Partners viewed the Epic project as a “foundation” on which to build future functionalities, why innovation can never take a backseat, and why data governance is “necessary for the sustainability of the entire organization.” He also speaks about the key challenges in transitioning from Mass General CIO to Partners CIO, why it’s time to stop viewing IT as a component of the organization’s strategy, and how something as simple as wayfinding can have a huge impact on patient care.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* Research as a “key stakeholder” in the Epic rollout

* Building a “solid research platform”

* Data governance as a foundation — “It’s necessary for the sustainability of the entire organization.”

* Cybersecurity: “We can’t take our foot off the pedal”

* Consolidating HIM as part of Partners 2.0

* “Standardization sometimes gets a bad rep.”

* Site CIOs as “business relationship managers”



LISTEN NOW USING THE PLAYER BELOW OR CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO OUR iTUNES PODCAST FEED

Bold Statements

They understood that they had a niche solution that had, from their perspective, better functionality. But that in the end, by having that single record and not having to use bailing wire and gum to cobble together interoperability, they would be better off, the patient would be better off.

They’re sourcing data not just from Epic, but genetics and genomics data — things like social determinants, imaging with metadata tagged to it, and patient-reported outcomes. There’s much more data available than just what’s in the core EHR.

It’s necessary for the sustainability of the entire organization that we do it well, because it can support clinical decision making, it can support population health management, it can support making business decisions, it can support clinical trials, and it can support basic research. So it’s really a key component.

Standardization sometimes gets a really bad rap. What we try to communicate is by standardizing some of the core services and the underlying infrastructure, that allows us to actually innovate more quickly.

Gamble:  Was moving to an integrated system a tough sell for the academic medical centers, especially the ones that had homegrown systems? Or was there an understanding that this is why we’re going to an integrated system?

Noga:  It wasn’t a difficult sell when they understood that this was all about the patient experience and being able to deliver better and safer care to our patients through that one record, through the whole continuum of care. People got it. They understood that they had a niche solution that had, from their perspective, better functionality. But that in the end, by having that single record and not having to use bailing wire and gum to cobble together interoperability between a variety of niche products, they would be better off, the patient would be better off. And it provides a great platform for generating data for our academic and research missions.

Gamble:  Right,