Jim Venturella, CIO, WVU Medicine, Chapter 1

Stepping in as the new CIO is never easy, particularly if you’re filling the shoes of a longtime leader who ushered the organization into the digital era. So when Jim Venturella took the helm at WVU Medicine, he knew he had a fine line to walk. He wanted to be patient enough not to push for any changes without first understanding the processes, while still pushing his team to do their best. In this interview, Venturella talks about what it was like to take over for Rich King, why he welcomed the opportunity to lead a system-wide transformation, and the role that having an integrated EHR can have in uniting an organization. He also discusses his roadmap for the Epic changes at WVU Medicine, what he believes are the biggest challenges for today’s CIOs, and why he still “operates as a consultant.”

Chapter 1



* WVU Medicine’s journey to integration

* 3 hospitals on Epic, plans for 4 more

* Education through site visits

* Epic everywhere — “I definitely think this is the right strategy.”

* Building buy-in through communication

* Eye on ACOs — “The world is not stopping.”



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Bold Statements

We’re going to bring individuals from the three hospitals that do have Epic back to the table to do an optimization of our current design, as well as get input from those facilities so that we hopefully truly have an enterprise model.

We’ve got a great foundation. We’re not going to recreate the wheel, but it gives us an opportunity to improve and optimize what we currently have and then extend it to everybody else.

Knowing that we were going with one core platform for the applications and not having the best-of-breed piecemeal solution was a big positive for me. Because I have seen both sides and I definitely think this is the right strategy to move forward with.

The more and more we talk about it, the more and more we bring people together from around the system, you get more excitement about actually being able to collaborate and work together versus resistance and that siloed thinking.

Gamble:  Hi Jim, thank you so much for taking some time to speak with healthsystemCIO.com.

Venturella:  No problem.

Gamble:  So to give our readers and listeners a little bit of information, can you give us an overview of West Virginia University Health System in terms of number of hospitals, ambulatory, things like that?

Venturella:  I can. First, I’ll let you know the new name. We have a new brand that was announced about two months ago now, and so we’re going by the name of WVU Medicine. It replaces the old name.

The health system itself has seven hospitals that are completely owned and we have one new hospital that’s a clinical affiliation. We’re in the early stages of defining what that really means. We have about 1400 beds across the seven facilities. From an ambulatory standpoint, we partner with West Virginia University on their three practice plans, so we support a little over 800 physicians on our platforms, which includes individuals from the practice plans as well as individual physicians who are employed by the health system.

Gamble:  And what type of system are you using for that?

Venturella:  For three of the hospitals, as well as the majority of the physicians, we’re using the full suite of Epic applications from clinical revenue cycle, inpatient and ambulatory. For the other four, we have a mixture of applications.

Gamble:  I guess this is the big question — is there a plan to get everything on Epic eventually?

Venturella:  Very soon, actually. That’s by far our biggest initiative right now. I have a number of people from my team going through Epic training to augment the existing Epic analysts that I have. And then in January,