Patty Lavely, SVP & CIO, Gwinnett Health System, Chapter 1

When Patty Lavely stepped into the CIO role at Gwinnett two years ago, one of her top priorities was to build a strong relationship with the CNO. It was something she had admittedly struggled with in the past, but one of the many lessons she learned during her time in consulting was that relationship management is an essential skill for today’s CIOs. In this interview, she shares more takeaways from her time in consulting, including how to build trust, and how to avoid the common trop of hiding behind bureaucracy. Lavely also discusses leading a major EHR selection process, how the organization revamped the security process by reassigning responsibilities, and the “daily challenge” CIOs face with prioritization.

Chapter 1



* About Gwinnett Health System

* Navigating a major EHR selection process

* Strong demo participation — “We’re trying to obtain as much input as possible.”

* Acquiring primary care practices

* Georgia’s HIE model — “A network of networks”

* Challenges of attesting to MU 2 with Horizon



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Bold Statements

The amount of change that will occur as a result of this implementation is probably the largest scoped project that Gwinnett has ever encountered. And Gwinnett has built new hospitals, but if you think about just changing everything in the existing organization, pretty much all at the same time, it’s major.

The state really has started to create an HIE that’s very valuable to us. Their model is sort of a network of networks and they really want to connect local or regional HIEs together versus individual hospitals or providers.

Some of the functionality required for Meaningful Use — and this has become more problematic as we move to stage 2 — is not well thought out in how the capability was added. It makes the workflows very awkward and not intuitive, and that has been a challenge for us.

We’ll go right into a stage 3 environment and have to keep all those numbers up for the transition, so that’ll be interesting. That will, I’m sure, require a lot of planning around that transition.

Gamble:  Hi Patty, thank you so much for taking some time to speak with us today.

Lavely:  You’re welcome. Thank you.

Gamble:  To get us started and get a little bit of background information for our readers and listeners, can you just talk a little bit about Gwinnett just as far as number of hospitals, beds, things like that?

Lavely:  Gwinnett Health System has two hospitals, 553 beds, and we also have inpatient rehab and a long-term care facility, as well as numerous ambulatory offerings with outpatient surgery, outpatient imaging. We have our first multispecialty center and we employ several specialties and primary care. As of last year, we began our first year with family medicine residency program. This year we have our first year with our internal medicine residency program, so we’re very excited about those two new programs.

Gamble:  And is that affiliated with a university?

Lavely:  It is not. It’s a Gwinnett Health System residency and we work with a couple of the universities around the state of Georgia, but we take residents from all over the world actually.

Gamble:  Great. Is that something that you hope to continue to build?

Lavely:  We do plan to expand it, yes.

Gamble:  And you’re located in Georgia, what type of area?

Lavely:  We are in the metropolitan Atlanta area, northeast of the city of Atlanta. We’re in Gwinnett County, which is a fairly populated county of almost a million residents.

Gamble:  In the hospitals, what type of EHR system do you have in place?

Lavely:  We currently have McKesson Horizon Clinicals, which are going to be sunsetted in 2018,