Joel Vengco, VP & CIO, Baystate Health, Chapter 1

There are many reasons why vendor executives might consider a move to the provider side; for Joel Vengco, who worked with product development at GE Healthcare IT, it was an opportunity to truly innovate. And sure enough, two years accepting the CIO role at Baytate Health, Vengco founded TechSpring, which provides “a platform for innovators to test out solutions” in a real-life environment. In this interview, Vengco talks about his goals with TechSpring and how it has helped shape the organization’s strategic direction, the work his team is doing to drive value-based care, and the goal of moving to an integrated platform. He also discusses the CIO’s role in managing expectations, why analytics is “the next big boom,” and the biggest challenge for today’s leaders.

Chapter 1



* About Baystate

* Next Generation ACO — “It takes an army and a village to pull this off.”

* Moving 2 acquired hospitals to Cerner

* HIE for integration — “It’s a nice solution in the interim, but we’d like to have a centralized system.”

* Centralized analytics

* Normalizing data — “There’s still work to be done.”



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Bold Statements

Everything is consolidating, and reimbursements continue to shrink, and so of course there’s a push for innovating on how you might deliver differently, more efficiently, more effectively a higher value.

When it’s a clean slate, you still have to provide some level of pre-population for patient demographics, but certainly the challenge is more focused on user adoption and training and understanding the new workflows.

We’ve created a central repository because it helps us ensure that we are achieving data that’s of high integrity and data that’s normalized and standardized in that we can ensure a single source of truth.

It’s not as easy as just pulling data out and then seeing some very cool graphs and visualizations. It takes a lot more effort to actually get to that end-game, and I think it’s prudent and worthwhile to actually make sure you’ve got a good information architecture and strategy so that you can reap those benefits of good information and insight.

Gamble:  Can you give us an overview of Baystate Health? I know you’re a pretty decent-sized system. You have five hospitals?

Vengco:  We have five hospitals now after our two acquisitions. We’re about $2.5 billion organization. We have 90 medical groups. We also have a health plan that we own called Health New England which has roughly 150,000 to 170,000 lives, and we’re also a Next Generation ACO. Originally there were 21, now there are 18 Next Gen ACOs.

Gamble:  So you’ve been able to stand the test of time so far with that.

Vengco:  Yes, so to speak. We feel hopeful that we have the ability and the partnerships across the region to really push forward with this new value-based arrangement and risk-sharing arrangement and hopefully, it’ll benefit the partners as well as the patients.

Gamble:  It’s really interesting, and I can tell why it’s a topic that with such interest throughout the industry right now.

Vengco:  Everything is consolidating, and reimbursements continue to shrink, and so of course there’s a push for innovating on how you might deliver differently, more efficiently, more effectively a higher value. So we hope that this will show that this is a certainly a possible initiative, and that what one would think to be able to do in light of value-based care is certainly possible. But it takes a whole army and a whole village to be able to pull this off.

Gamble:  How long has the ACO been in place?

Vengco:  The ACO has been in place for at the very least five years, if not, longer.

Gamble:  And it was a pioneer, right?

Vengco:  That’s right,