Q&A with CIO Darrell Bondar, Part 2: “I’m not looking for a vendor; I’m looking for a partner.”

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



* One area where Covid made a positive impact? Helping to erase “the historical stigma in healthcare that people had to be onsite.”

* Since becoming a three-hospital system, North Country Healthcare has been able to secure better contracts and negotiate better pricing, says Bodnar. “It made our partnerships much easier.”

* Having an individual who specializes in negotiations and purchasing and can “look at GPO contracts in-depth and push vendors,” helps remove some of the pressure and enables Bodnar to focus on maintaining relationships.

* “I’m not looking for a vendor, I’m looking for a partner, and that partner needs to really offer something up.”

* For Bodnar, being part owner of a brewery has helped him stay connected with the community — particularly during Covid — while pursuing a “passion.”





Q&A with CIO Darrell Bodnar, Part 2 [Click here to view Part 1]

Gamble:  For things like surgical follow-up, virtual care really does seem like a good option, but as you said, it all comes down to reimbursement.

Darrell:  It does. From a surgical piece, sometimes they’re looking at bundling in surgical services as a predictable model. We have one provider that’s piloting a piece for this where he is doing his remote follow-ups virtually. As post-surgical visits are done virtually with patients to follow up, the concern isn’t as much as patient outcomes as it is reimbursement, particularly with a bundled payment for an OR service. There are opportunities there if we look at how we model these. When it comes to virtual care, I believe prevention and follow-up are the prime opportunities.

 

Gamble:  That makes sense.

Darrell:  We have an elderly population, and so when you think about even the tele-assistance model where we’re monitoring them at home, it can help with safety concerns. It can be safer if you have those things in the home. And we’re not talking about the ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up’ button; we’re talking about real-time monitoring of patients.

And I’m not going to delve into what I would call artificial intelligence or machine learning, but there are clearly algorithms that we can use that can help identify patterns or inconsistencies that can alert the provider or clinical staff immediately if a patient falls or takes a turn for the worse. It could be even a longer period of time; if yo...