Patrick Yount, CIO, Lincoln Community Hospital and Care Center, Chapter 3

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

Chapter 2

Chapter 3



* Benefits of rural health – “You have an opportunity to become a jack of all trades.”

* HIPAA compliance challenges

* Providing bandwidth for patients

* Being a “champion of MU”

* “We’re being asked to do as much as everyone else with fewer resources.”

* Rural health’s tight-knit community

* Mentor advice – “You’ve got to deal with the day-to-day”



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Bold Statements

You have an opportunity to become a jack of all trades — you may get lucky enough to become master of some of them. You get exposed both on the clinical side and on the administrative side to things that you may not have seen otherwise.

A lot of the regulations and compliance guidelines that come out of Washington are very much directed toward the larger systems — but the same regulations and compliance issues fall on us, and we feel like we’re overlooked more often than not.

If you add in the payment penalties that could potentially be tied to something as simple as patient portal use, that 1 or 2 percent could be the difference between my door staying open, and us not having a hospital in Hugo, Colorado.

You’ve got to deal with day to day. You have to maintain that balance of making sure people are taken care of today, but you also have to be a fortune teller in some ways. You have to have your eye on the crystal ball.

Gamble:  What do you feel are the biggest challenges and opportunities being in a rural health setting?

Yount:  One of the big challenges you hear, which I alluded to before, is that it’s hard to find good staff. It’s hard to find people that are good at what they do who want to come out here and give up a lot of the amenities they have in more urban areas to provide care to patients. It also offers a great opportunity for people. If you’ve ever worked in a large healthcare organization, you find that a lot of the job skills are very siloed. You have your one area of focus, and you don’t delve outside of that area because the people sitting to the right and left of you are going to help you along those lines. And so if you do find someone who’s willing to come out to rural areas, you have an opportunity to become a jack of all trades — you may get lucky enough to become master of some of them. You get exposed both on the clinical side and on the administrative side to things that you may not have seen otherwise. It’s a challenge,