Mike Canfield, VP of Operations & CIO, Firelands Regional Medical Center, Chapter 3

When it comes to assembling an EHR selection committee, organizations have to think like Goldilocks; not too big, and not too small. Too big of a group means too many opinions to reconcile, and too small gives off the impression that only a few voices count. And so when Firelands Regional put together a group, CIO Mike Canfield opted for somewhere in the middle, a move he believes will pay off come decision time. In this interview, he talks about why the organization is ripping out its EHR system and why it’s critical to have a vendor that will serve as a true partner. Canfield also discusses the major changes he faced after joining Firelands, why having a solid knowledge of project management is a must, and what 20 years in health IT has taught him.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3



* IT liaison to the clinical team — “It was a great look into operations.”

* Project management experience with Kaiser

* Staying out of the weeds & “focused on the more strategic role.”

* Recruiting challenges

* “We do our best to grown our own talent.”

* Keys to staff engagement



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Bold Statements

It really changes a whole discussion about the work and the way you view it. Instead of some longitudinal ongoing stream, it becomes a number of different-sized blocks of work that can be moved around and coordinated and reassigned.

I didn’t try to stay in the weeds. I brought some of those simple project management disciplines to the organization and got them comfortable using those, but I didn’t try to function as a CIO and also continue to do any meaningful project management.

I recognize the things that I’m good at and that I have the time to focus on, and I try to build teams around me that fill in the gaps for my particular skill set and that are right for the organization.

We do reach outside every opportunity we get to look for resources from other industries and other areas so that we don’t become so single-focused here and we get some good diversity of opinion and experience, but it’s difficult.

It’s a challenging time, and I think the more information that we can share with each other and the more that we start approaching things from a common base, the better off we are.

Gamble:  Before coming to Firelands, you were with Kaiser Permanente and in kind of a project manager-type role?

Canfield:  I’m in Ohio and Kaiser at that time had an Ohio region. It was their smallest region and was not a hospital region. It was large medical office buildings with some 24-hour ED services and ambulatory surgery and things like that and a number of physician offices and clinics, but no inpatient care. I was hired as a program manager for the Epic implementation on the IT side for the Ohio region. So that’s what I started doing with them.

Soon after I got there, the national IT organization at Kaiser decided that the region should all have project management offices in the IT organization, so I set up the project manager office for Ohio and brought on some project managers and ran that. And then I ended up with some other assorted responsibilities along the way; again, in a small region, you end up wearing more than one hat.

One of the most valuable things for me was being the IT liaison to the clinical delivery team. I would meet with the heads of clinical operations on a monthly basis, including some of the VPs of clinical operations, to talk about what they’re doing,