Matthew Kull, SVP & CIO, Parkland Hospital, Chapter 2

One component that cannot be overlooked when planning a project? The need for agility, according to Matthew Kull, who says that when Parkland Hospital’s newly opened campus was designed 7 years ago, the strategy was to build a platform to support technology — but defer decisions on which devices would be implemented. It’s this kind of decision-making (which may have avoided having a hospital full of BlackBerries) that has made Parkland one of the most respected hospitals in the country. In this interview, Kull talks about the organization’s strategy to move away from customization, how his team tests technologies in mock environments, and their big plans with big data.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* Testing technology in a mock environment

* IT’s objective “to be as invisible to our patients as possible.”

* $1.3 billion hospital development project

* “It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever done.”

* Key to big projects: “Talk to as many people as you can.”

* Eyeing predictive analytics

* Learning from the vendor & consulting worlds



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Bold Statements

Since we had some idea of how these technologies were going to work, and how they were going to interoperate together in the mock environment, it eliminated a lot of the guessing.

Talk to as many people as you can who have done projects like this. We all like to share our story to help people avoid some of the problems that we encountered. But I think having a truly good understanding of scope and making sure that everyone comes to the table early to talk about what needs to be accomplished is critical.

We believe that information truly is going to be the key to better outcomes, and so we’re investing heavily in various technologies to allow people within our organization to have not only access to information, where appropriate, but to be able to really dive in and ask meaningful questions of the data.

What we’re finding is that the continuum of any of our patients’ care is so much bigger than just the information we have in the EMR. We’re trying to tap into things like social determinants and where else they’re getting care, and looking at non-traditional points of care to serve some of our most in-need patients.

Gamble:  In planning for all of this, did you and the other executive leaders talk to people at other organizations or do site visits or how did you kind of get a picture of what things might look like?

Kull:  We certainly did a lot of site visits. We had a mockup environment that was an exact replication of a number of areas in the hospital, whether it would be a hospital room, physician work rooms, or the OR. There was an offsite facility that was largely an identical replica of significant portions of the hospital, scaled down, where we had vendors come in and bring their different technologies so that we could do day-in-the-life studies of how these technologies were going to interact with actual usage. It wasn’t limited to technology; we tested lighting systems for the operating rooms. We had a lot of different vendors come in and show what was available to us, and we actually got to select them by, to some degree, mock-using them in true-to-life scenarios.

Gamble:  Interesting. Did that turn out to be pretty accurate for how things went once the hospital was live?

Kull:  It really was. Since we had some idea of how these technologies were going to work, and how they were going to interoperate together in the mock environment, it certainly eliminated a lot of the guessing. And on the day we went live, it wasn’t the first time we saw a lot of these things.