Ken Lawonn, SVP & CIO, Sharp HealthCare, Chapter 1

To say that security has gained traction as a priority is quite an understatement. In fact, Ken Lawonn gets more questions about security from his CEO and board than any other topic. And so it should come as no surprise that Sharp has changed its entire approach, creating an IT risk management department and recruiting its first CISO. In this interview, Lawonn talks about the rapid evolution of Sharp’s security strategy, how the organization looks to leverage its managed care expertise to thrive in the population health world, and his thoughts on integration — including what his team is currently doing to provide a unified view of data, and how this plan may change in the future. He also discusses what it was like to go from being the acquiring party at Alegent Health to being acquired, why he made the move to San Diego, and what it’s been like to fill Bill Spooner’s shoes.

Chapter 1



* About Sharp HealthCare

* Hospitals on Cerner, practices on Allscripts

* Leveraging dbMotion’s HIE to present “an integrated view.”

* Internally developed data warehouse

* Short-term & long-term costs of a single-vendor approach

* Predictive analytics — “You’ve got to be able to capture that data.”



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Bold Statements

We’ve done a good job of presenting an integrated view for clinicians; although they have to link out to see that, we believe that we’ve done a fairly good of providing a good patient experience.

It will allow us to step back and let someone else frame the questions and challenge us where appropriate. We just think it’s a better way to go, and that getting some outside assistance will give us that independent perspective that will also leverage what experiences that others have gone through.

You might be able to make the investment upfront, but what’s the long-term cost? That’s what we’re trying to understand — if we were to invest in a single platform, do we gain some efficiencies? Do we reduce our operating costs on an ongoing basis, or is it going to cost us more?

We understand what our charges are and what the utilization is, and now we want to look at analytics that can help us move more to predictive analytics and more decision making on a real-time basis.

Everybody’s looking at measuring people for fallouts from a quality side, or a financial performance side. We’ve got to provide the people that are making the decisions with the information that can help them understand what the necessary requirements are and what the implications are.

Gamble:  Hi Ken, thank you so much for taking some time to speak with us today.

Lawonn:  You’re welcome.

Gamble:  If you could start by just giving a brief overview about Sharp HealthCare — what you have in terms of number of hospitals, where you’re located, things like that.

Lawonn:  Sure, I’d be happy to. Sharp HealthCare is an integrated delivery system located in San Diego County. We have seven hospitals — four acute hospitals and three specialty hospitals, including a large women and children’s hospital. We have two affiliated medical groups, Sharp Rees-Stealy, which is a foundation plan medical group that has 550 providers in 22 locations, and then Sharp Community Medical Group, which is an independent practice affiliation (IPA) that aligns over 700 independent physicians with Sharp. We also have 110,000 members in a health plan that’s growing very rapidly. We have two skilled nursing facilities and also have home health and hospice. Sharp employs about 17,000 people.

Gamble:  In terms of the clinical application environment, what type of EHR system are you using in the hospitals?

Lawonn:  The hospitals are all on Cerner. We’ve been running Cerner for about eight years.