Q&A with CIO Lee Milligan, Part 3: “Clarity Can Make a Big Difference.”

It almost didn’t happen. Lee Milligan seriously contemplated texting the CEO in the middle of the night to say he had changed his mind about taking the CIO role at Asante. His doubts were completely understandable; not only did it mean leaving the CMIO position, which is a significant change, but it also meant filling the shoes of his predecessor, who had resigned after more than 20 years at the helm.

If that wasn’t daunting enough, a new CEO had just taken over.

Fortunately, Milligan never sent the text, having decided that the rewards outweighed the risks. But it hasn’t been an easy adjustment. “I had to be more honest with myself than I’ve ever been in my professional career in sizing up what I do well and in what areas I’m lacking,” he said in a recent interview, during which he opened up about how he was able to grasp the CIO responsibilities, what surprised him most during the first 6 months, the goals he has established for his team, and why he never takes metrics at face value.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3



* Leveraging Arch Collaborative data to measure user experience – “Not doing that is a mistake.”

* Process improvement framework

* Finding “more automated and more efficient” methods

* High reliability: “It’s not just for network and storage folks.”

* Lessons learned as CIO: “People really want face time.”

* His open-door policy

* Vendor relationships



LISTEN NOW USING THE PLAYER BELOW OR CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO OUR iTUNES PODCAST FEED

Bold Statements

My thinking was, if we’re going to ask folks to spend 20 minutes of their day filling out a survey, I had better be willing to sit down and read every word they wrote.

We have to find a way to do more with the same amount of resources — not less, but the same. And so, in order to widen our bandwidth, we’re going to have to do what we currently do, in a more automated fashion and a more efficient fashion.

Ultimately, if we can look internally and make improvements, our bandwidth is going to expand exponentially.

This concept of high reliability isn’t just for network folks and storage folks; this is for everyone to do their job reliably.

We depend heavily on the Internet to be able to get our jobs done. If Epic or the network goes down in one area, it’s going to affect everything.

Gamble:  You have experience as a physician builder — I can imagine that has been really helpful in this role.

Milligan:  That piece has been big. When we received our KLAS Arch Collaborative survey results, we were a bit nervous first, because we had never really taken our temperature in an objective way. We thought we had done a good job delivering a decent EHR for our folks, but we weren’t 100 percent sure.

As it turned out, the Arch Collaborative scores were really positive. I think it surprised some of us that it was quite that good. KLAS is known for slicing and dicing information dozens of different ways; the initial PowerPoint had something like 220 slides.

One of the slides that really stood out was where they broke down satisfaction based on specialty, and compared your results are compared with the rest of the Arch Collaborative findings. It showed that there were five or six specialties that were way above the average — in some cases, it was literally twice the satisfaction rate. In our system, each of those specialties has a physician builder. The ones that scored average (or close to it) do ...