Joel Taylor, SVP & CIO, CarePoint Health System, Chapter 1

When Joel Taylor sees people who are out of place and talking to someone in a completely different role, he doesn’t mind at all. In fact, he finds it to be inspiring, because it shows people are curious and willing to step out of their comfort zones. In this interview, the CIO at CarePoint Health System talks about what his team is doing to create growth opportunities in IT to make sure they’re able to retain top talent. He also discusses the multi-phased coordinated care initiative at his organization, the challenges in engaging with elderly patients, the power of organic mentoring how his team is working through data sharing hurdles with acquired physician practices, and how he’s working to make innovation part of the overall strategy, and not just “the next toy.”

Chapter 1



* About CarePoint

* Upgrading to the newest Meditech version — “Staying where you are is not a good business decision.”

* eClinicalWorks in owned practices

* Data-sharing hurdles — “They certainly don’t make it easy for us.”

* Creating a defined risk management process

* “Now it happens as a matter of our day-to-day business.”



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Bold Statements

With any upgrade, you have tremendous amount of concern with how that’s going to go, what the impact’s going to be, what’s going to break. There’s no getting around that.

Coming from a 28-year IT veteran, you find it hard to believe that a company could build a product and have a database that’s hosting that product and not have the very simple fundamental understanding of how you extract that data and provide it to a customer.

It’s being able to help the operational side of house understand the due diligence that’s necessary and the work that needs to be done so that we can properly manage and support their infrastructure.

We spent a lot of time in the beginning working with the integration team operationally and letting them know our time constraints and the places where we need to have pauses so that we can do things right. Now we’re notified with plenty of advance notice and have the opportunity to do the things we need to do.

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

Taylor:  My pleasure.

Gamble:  So to give our readers and listeners some background information, can you just talk a little bit about CarePoint Health System — what you have in terms of hospitals, ambulatory, things like that.

Taylor:  CarePoint Health is a three-hospital, 75-medical practice, healthcare system in Hudson County, New Jersey in northern New Jersey. We have about 500 physicians at this point and are expanding to other parts of the state as we speak.

Gamble:  Can you talk a little bit about how the health system came together?

Taylor:  The ownership of CarePoint Health acquired Bayonne Medical Center back in around 2008. And then in the mid-to-late 2012 timeframe, they purchased Hoboken University Medical Center and Christ Hospital, putting us in a position where we own 75 percent of the hospitals in Hudson County.

Gamble:  In terms of the clinical application environment, what EHR system is being used in the hospital?

Taylor:  In the hospitals, we primarily use Meditech. We do have some other products like the GE Centricity, which we use for OB and pediatric activities in the hospitals, but the dominant EMR is Meditech.

Gamble:  Which version is that?

Taylor:  6.X.

Gamble:  Were these hospitals on Meditech previously or was there a migration done once they were acquired?

Taylor:  There were some migrations that took place prior to my coming on board. At Bayonne, I don’t think they had anything — at least I haven’t heard of anything. At Christ Hospital, there was McKesson,