Michael Martz, CIO, Ohio Valley Health Services, Chapter 2

“Are you out of your mind?” It was the reaction Mike Martz received when he left Meadville Medical Center, the community hospital that was one of the first in the country to implement Meditech 6.1, only to do it all over again at a two-hospital system with a lean budget. But to Martz, it was a chance to drive positive change; not just by migrating to a new platform, but by forging a new path at an organization that didn’t have a CIO. In this interview, he talks about how he’s applying lessons learned from the previous Meditech migration to the current initiative, why he believes big bang is the only way to go, and his approach to being the new CIO. Martz also shares his thoughts on how to build credibility with senior leaders, and why it’s essential to be recognized first as a executive.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* Oct. 1 go-live

* The “paradigm shift” in going from Meditech Magic to 6.1

* Lesson learned: test and test again

* Operational metrics before & after go-live

* New data center platform to “dramatically improve uptime and reliability.”

* Goal of becoming “more patient-centered.”

* Collaborating with other hospitals



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

Bold Statements

We’re intentionally changing how a lot of the clinical processes and the administrative processes work, people have a bit of a paradigm shift to go through in some ways. So there’s going to be a lot of handholding until people get comfortable with the new way of everything working.

You can never test enough, and even if you do, you’ll definitely not catch all the problems that a real user on go-live day will discover. So we just have to be prepared to react and respond as quickly as possible when those issues do come up.

That will dramatically improve our uptime and reliability and reduce our operational costs as well, and make it much faster and less expensive for us to bring up new systems when the demands come — and they always do.

We’re still a classic hospital organization from that standpoint, so we have some culture change and some realignment of departments and responsibilities between people that we are working through as we implement this new system. In some ways, the new system is almost an excuse to drive change.

We really look at it as a business and clinical partnership first and then we fold in the IT aspects after that. In some cases, IT winds up being the foot in the door to open up a relationship that we may not have had. But in most cases, it is just supporting relationships that we have in place and making them stronger and tighter.

Gamble:  From a perspective of support and making sure there is enough, how are you working to make sure you have enough for the October 1 go-live?

Martz:  That is a challenge for us. One of the challenges of this organization is that it is leaner than Meadville was. I think that a lot of hospitals are. I don’t know if there’s a strong rule of thumb, but the majority of hospitals I talk to seem to have a range of about one IT person for every 10 or so patient beds, and that was true at Meadville. Here we have about one IT person for every 17 patient beds. So we’re covering a lot more territory with fewer people, and that does make the support very challenging.

The way we’re dealing with that is to get a lot more engagement with super users and getting them involved in the build. We have a couple of dozen core teams that are helping do the build of this new system, and those core teams are mostly not IT people. They’re mostly departmental people, which means that they’re going to understand the system quite well at go-l...