Q&A with CIO Darrell Bodnar, Part 1: “It’s going to be a new level of competition.”

When a group of hospitals came together to form North Country Healthcare, it offered several benefits to its member facilities. Not only did it help with recruiting talent and offering more services to patients; it also meant being able to negotiate better contracts.

For Darrell Bodnar, it means no longer having to play “bad cop,” because now NCH had an individual who specializes in contract negotiations and purchasing who can “look at GPO contracts in-depth and push those vendors.” It also means he’s able to focus on maintaining vendor relationships.

Recently, Bodnar spoke with healthsystemCIO about the many ways in which being part of a multi-hospital system – and not a standalone – has changed his team’s approach. He also talked about the journey they’ve been on to move to an integrated EHR platform, how Covid has transformed their virtual care strategy, what he believes is the biggest threat for rural and small organizations, and how brewing beer has become his “therapy.”

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Key Takeaways



* North Country Healthcare was formed when four hospitals that were “geographically and operationally similar” came together to be better able to recruit physicians and offer services to the community.

* The next stage with NCH’s Meditech journey is optimization, which requires “removing any variances from the process” and enabling providers to “share their services across multiple entities without having to learn new systems, or even learn new templates, workflows, and documentation.”

* After hitting pause on the Meditech rollout for about six weeks, NCH picked it back up because “we didn’t know what Covid was going to bring, but we did know that we could better handle it being on a single system.”

* Like many organizations, NCH is reevaluating its virtual care platform, including what tools are being utilized, and how.

* One of the biggest threats facing rural healthcare organizations are the retail giants and payers who have entered the virtual care and remote patient monitoring games. “It’s going to be a new level of competition that we’ve never dealt with before. And with payers getting into the market, to me that’s a really big risk for rural healthcare.





Q&A with Darrell Bodnar, CIO, North Country Healthcare, Part 1

Bodnar:  Every industry needs a catalyst, and ours, unfortunately, was COVID. It put people back on their heels and made them focus on priorities. The healthcare industry is challenged by regulatory requirements and a variety of different things. But, as far as I could tell, they’ve never been as disrupted as they just were — and still are.

It hit right to the core. What was fundamental in terms of our revenue source, no longer is. We were forced to be dynamic, and there were levels of competition coming in from areas we you never expected — mostly due to virtual care delivery, but also from some of the digital giants that are out there. It’s just a very unique time, and I honestly think there are going to be some serious casualties from this as we go forward.

 

Gamble:  I agree. I do want to delve into that, but first let’s get some basic information about North Country Healthcare, which has a pretty unique model. Can you talk about how the organization is structured and how it came together?

Bodnar:  I’ll give you the good and the bad. When North Country Healthcare first came together, it was a collection of four critical access hospitals and a home health agency. They came together because we’re geographically and operationally very similar...