Joel Vengco, VP & CIO, Baystate Health, Chapter 2

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

Chapter 2



* Managing EHR expectations

* Big data as the next “big boom”

* “Patients are clamoring for their data.”

* Communicating the “deep details” to leadership

* Cloud-based analytics with Premier

* TechSpring Innovation Center: “A lot of it is sharing lessons learned.”

* Looking outside of healthcare

* Creating “an environment to test out solutions.”



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Bold Statements

I think it’s absolutely critical to be able to show the lifecycle of data as it exits the EHR and gets into eventually a report or an analytic. And again, folks at the highest levels don’t realize the evolution that a piece of data has to go through to get to that final stage of visualization.

A lot of it is sharing lessons learned and sharing analytics that sit on top of the same data model, and so the idea is that you get velocity to value in a form that’s hopefully more rapid than you would if you were doing it on your own. Plus, you have the economy of scale to leverage a platform that’s shared by many, so that hopefully that drives down the cost.

We’ve got a lot of folks that come up with technologies that they believe could work in healthcare that have worked in other industries. I think that’s the kind of collaboration and coalitions that we need to really derive the best possible innovations.

All those together create a platform for innovators to really test out their solutions. Whether they’re technology solutions, analytics solutions, or device solutions or apps, the whole intention is to create an environment for folks who believe they’ve got a winning solution.

Gamble:  That’s interesting. I think maybe it’s been underestimated how complicated the entire process is. It’s not something where you get quick results.

Vengco:  I think it’s a challenge for the CIO to be able to articulate that well. Because naturally, as a board member or as an executive that has now poured in let’s say several hundred million dollars into an EHR, you’re expecting that there’s some outcome from that other than just, ‘hey, we’ve digitized the record.’ A lot of folks expect that we’re going to be able to see all of these great reports and analytics, and unfortunately, that’s just not the case right now. A lot of the EHR vendors are moving towards better standardization. We’re seeing legislation that focused on more data standardization, harmonization, and focus on liberating data, as I like to call it. Those are the things that we still have yet to achieve in today’s industry.

I think that’s really the next large boom in healthcare, which is analytics and use of data for insight, knowledge, and action. And by the way, that’s not just for the health system, administrators, and providers; the patients are clamoring for that data also. They want to see their record. They want to be able to manage their health and ...