Joel Vengco, VP & CIO, Baystate Health, Chapter 3

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

Chapter 3                       



* 4 main pillars of TechSpring

* Eye on predictive and prescriptive analytics

* Providing “high-touch mobility through digital platforms”

* Not just an incubator, but a “connection to the organism”

* Innovator-funded model

* Working with Cerner, Imprivata & Medecision

* “The ability to transform is crucial to survive.”



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

Bold Statements

It adds value because it’s an open collaboration with a health system that looks a lot like many of their customers. So rather than creating a product to isolation, they’re able to really put it in vivo into a live organism like Baystate Health. That’s a very important part of the product lifecycle.

There was a profound change that had occurred when Healthcare Reform was deployed across the country, and that profound change is forcing all of us to practice differently. And so in order for us to survive in this new era, we really have to leverage innovation and transformation of the way that we do business.

We as CIOs could absolutely get bogged down with the first level, which is to run and hopefully grow the organization, but oftentimes, we focus so much on the blocking and tackling that we end up losing the ability to transform.

There are so many vendors, so many startups trying to help solve our problems; the least we could do is partner with them and collaborate with them to see if we can push their and our agenda forward so that we can really impact healthcare.

Gamble:  So at any given time, there could be a couple different innovations being put to the test.

Vengco:  Absolutely. We focus on four main pillars in TechSpring right now. At the moment, we were actually actively working on all four of them, and those include what we call the next generation health information systems. Not so much the EHR but things that goes into population health, such as mobile apps for providers. We’re actually working on one right now that sits on top of our central EHR. It provides a mobile solutions for our docs that require a more efficient and more speedy workflow, like urgent care for example, or even our ambulatory docs who need to have a very quick workflow. Many of them will want to get on to more of a mobile device platform; this is an innovation that sits on top of Cerner and uses FHIR and other APIs that are provided, and hopefully gets them a better workflow. That’s one area.

Another area we’ve touched on already is analytics. We’ve got a number of irons in the fire for developing predictive and prescriptive analytics for our health system. It utilizes, obviously, the data that’s in our EHR, but we’re also looking at use of data from our Health Information Exchange and also...