Keith Jennings, CIO, Massachusetts General Hospital & Physicians Organization, Chapter 3

A few years ago, Massachusetts General was starting down the path of implementing a new revenue cycle when they hit a bit of a roadblock. The parent organization, Partners HealthCare, had decided to go “soup to nuts” with Epic, meaning that CIO Keith Jennings would have to construct a detour. But when your “world changes,” that’s exactly what a leader needs to do, and so he created in a new roadmap in collaboration with other Partners hospitals. Now, Mass General is in “a much better place,” according to Jennings. In this interview, he discusses the balancing act of keeping the goals of the hospital and Physicians Organization aligned, why his team is planning a staggered go-live, and the work they’re doing with population health. He also talks about how Mass General is working to make innovation and process improvement part of the culture, and what it was like stepping into Jim Noga’s shoes.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3



* Applying PI principles to helpdesk support

* Keys to fostering innovation

* 15 years at Mass General

* Filling Jim Noga’s shoes — “There was no learning curve.”

* Past lives in programming & consulting

* Epic changes — “Our world will be significantly different after we go live.”

* The “larger value-add” of today’s CIO



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Bold Statements

I wanted to make it apparent to the folks running the program and to the clinical staff that if they wanted IT help or support, I have a whole bunch of people who’d love to partner with them and be their number two as they get into these kinds of projects.

We have 26,000 employees, 1,800 docs, and a couple of thousand nurses, and to empower all of them with the tools to make either incremental or large-scale improvements is just a fantastic thing.

A lot of folks still sometimes reach out to Jim as muscle memory, thinking, ‘Jim’s the IT guy.’ Well, now he’s my boss and he’s got another set of views, and so I have to try and corral some of those things.

Epic’s software is great, but one of the things that it will really do for us is to start providing some normalized discrete data, which provides significant benefits to the clinicians, but it also starts providing large stores of data that you can actually compare and do work against.

We are moving into a world where I have a larger value to add to the organization as a data manager, both providing data, but also helping the clinicians and staff to use that data in a more effective path or process.

Jennings:  I volunteered and forced my way into one of the classes even though it’s only supposed to be for clinicians and a lot of people said, ‘Keith, why would you go there?’ And I said, ‘For two reasons. One, because, boy, isn’t this interesting and wouldn’t I want all of my IT staff to be able to do these same kind of things — perhaps on slightly different problems, but we have problems like this. And then I wanted to make it apparent to the folks running the program and to the clinical staff that if they wanted IT help or support, I have a whole bunch of people who’d love to partner with them and be their number two as they get into these kinds of projects. A lot of them are hand hygiene or other activities, but an awful lot of them have to deal with data analysis or small applications or interpreting data that the clinicians may or may not be expert at, but an IT person can help with that, so I’m forcing my way into this program to let our staff ...