Jonathan Goldberg, CIO, Arkansas Children’s Hospital, Chapter 2

When asked why they chose to pursue a new role, leaders often say they needed a challenge. Although sometimes it can be code for another reason, it certainly seems fitting in Jonathan Goldberg’s case. A year and a half ago, he left St. Peter’s Health Partners in upstate New York to serve as CIO at Arkansas Children’s Hospital, the only facility of its kind in a state that ranks 49th overall in children’s health. While that might have some people running for the hills, Goldberg views it as a “huge opportunity to make a difference.” In this interview, he talks about the learning curve in transitioning to pediatric care, the challenge in juggling multiple big projects at the same time, the innovative work his team is doing with telemedicine, and how they’re leveraging technology to stay lean.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* ACH’s Epic project — “We tried to stay skinny & do projects ourselves.”

* Small vs large rollouts

* The leap of faith with workflow planning

* Leveraging analytics to forecast staffing needs

* “Labor is your most significant cost.”

* Recruiting challenges in Little Rock

* “The more we can use what we have, the better.”



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Bold Statements

We really believed we could do a lot of things quicker and easier in relating to decisions and process changes than with some of the other implementations. So we tried to stay pretty skinny as it relates to projects and do more ourselves.

I can’t say it hasn’t been an exercise in having people learn and have some faith in their decisions, because there are some things they’ve been asked to decide on that they won’t see until the final product is done.

It enables you to start forecasting staffing needs. And so as you connect the dots, it allows you to really understand where you’re going to need more staff in certain areas based on the workload, and you can be very smart with your resources.

We have very high expectations of our staff, but at the same time, you want them to enjoy what they do. If people enjoy what they do, a lot of times they’ll forget about the things they don’t like.

Gamble:  Going back to Epic rollout, did you have somebody heading up that implementation? How did that work as far as governance?

Goldberg:  Our VP of Applications is considered the project executive or project director. He took that role on and he’s been the lead from our side. And then Epic brings their project director to the table as well to manage the project from their end. The two of them, in combination, become the project management team. And we certainly have a steering committee, as you would expect from a project this size, which includes a lot of the senior leaders and operational leaders from the organization.

So far it’s gone very well in terms of being able to make decisions. Nothing has been that controversial. One of the benefits we have — and it really did dictate how we implement it — is we try to do more in-house and less outsourcing. A lot of the Epic implementations in recent years have been multi-site organizations that had multiple leadership teams, multiple CMOs, CNOs and CFOs, and different physician groups that practiced in each of those organizations. That was the type of environment I came from.

When you reach the point of implementing a system that requires standardization of content, workflow, and process, it requires a lot more governance than what we had in a single entity with con...