Patrick Yount, CIO, Lincoln Community Hospital and Care Center, Chapter 1

In today’s complex healthcare environment, pushing any initiative forward isn’t merely complex. In fact, it’s like “hitting a moving target with a bow and arrow from 1,000 yards away — while blindfolded,” says Patrick Yount. But no matter how big (or small) the task, the key is to ask the right questions and talk to the right people. And for the past year and a half, that’s precisely what he’s been doing as CIO at Lincoln Community Hospital, where his goals are to move to a single EHR platform, improve the patient experience, and shore up the revenue cycle process.

In this interview, Yount talks about how his plans to tackle these lofty goals, all while dealing with the challenges that come with being a rural health facility. He’ll discuss his strategy in selecting a vendor, the “fantastic opportunity” Lincoln has to become a leader in behavioral health, the approach he took as the organization’s first CIO, and why, despite its faults, he’s still a champion of Meaningful Use.

Chapter 1



* About Lincoln: serving Colorado’s rural population

* Goal to remain 100% independent

* His approach as new CIO: “There was a lot of 1-on-1 dialogue and an open line of communication.”

* Addressing “rudimentary” disaster recovery plan

* Moving to SOC 2 data centers – “That was a big win for us.”

* Challenges recruiting IT talent

* Selecting an EHR & planning the rollout: “There are a lot of components”



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Bold Statements

It’s always a strategy of mine to try to align the IT initiatives as closely as I can with the overall initiatives of the business. But without really understanding what the end users were dealing with, I was just making a lot of assumptions which don’t usually go across all that well.

We don’t have any patient data living in our data centers. I feel like that was a big win for us. Regardless of what we choose moving forward, we’re going to be better off in terms of having one patient chart and having a more robust system.

The end user experience is one of the most heavily-weighted factors, but you can’t necessarily make the decision solely based on how the end users are going to use the system. You need to ask, is it going to work for us? Are we going to be able to implement it?

We want to make sure we do it right — not just fast. That being said, there are always those regulatory issues forcing your hand. You have to have certain functionality in place in order to meet those and avoid the subsequent penalties in future years.

 

Gamble:  Hi Patrick, thank you for taking some time to speak with us. I look forward to hearing about what you and your team are doing.

Yount:  Absolutely, thank you for having me. I can’t begin to tell you how nice it is to be recognized, and to speak with organizations that are putting a spotlight on rural healthcare. We tend to be the red-headed stepchild in the healthcare space.

 

Gamble:  To get started, can you give an overview of Lincoln Community Hospital and Care Center — what you have in terms of hospital beds, long-term care, things like that?

Yount:  Absolutely. Lincoln Community Hospital is a critical access hospital located about an hour and a half east of Denver along the I-70 corridor. We have a 15-bed critical access inpatient unit with a 40-bed long-term care unit attached to the facility. We started practicing medicine in 1959 and received the critical access designation in the early 1990s. In terms of demographics, our patient population is about 10,000, but we actually service an area that’s larger than the State of Connecticut. We have patients coming to us from far and wide, and I feel like we’re a crucial care provider for our patient population.