Q&A with CIO Sheryl Sypek, Part 1: “Care Is Being Driven into the Home.”

When you go from a large, integrated health system in the northeast to a Florida-based organization focused on hospice, palliative care, and home health, there are going to be some glaring differences. But for Sheryl Sypek, who took on the CIO role at Chapters Health System three years ago, the biggest contrast she saw was in the EHR market, which is “far less mature” than in the acute care hospital world.

As one can imagine, it made for a much different vendor selection process. But it also resulted in both an education, and a bonding experience, for her team. Recently, we spoke with Sypek about how she learned to navigate the brave new world of palliative and hospice care, why she made the move, and how she and her team plan to continue to forge a new path in this growing sector. Sypek also talks about how her time in consulting made her “a better CIO,” why Chapters is uniquely positioned to thrive in a value-based care world, and why giving back is so important.

Part 1



* About Chapters: large system providing a range of services in the non-acute, non-physician practice setting

* “It’s like running a community hospital that’s divided into eight pieces.”

* In-house pharmacy services

* Three service lines, three “very siloed” EHRs

* “It’s challenging to be able to interface outside of our organization.”

* The immature non-acute EHR market

* Reimagining the vendor selection process – “We really did our due diligence.”



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Bold Statements

It’s that whole care navigation piece — that’s what we do. We’ve called it post-acute for a long time; but now it’s about navigating a patient’s care when they want to stay in their home.

We often get referrals from hospitals where the patient is days or even hours from passing. We would prefer to provide that benefit much further upstream for a patient.

In the integrated world where you have Epic, Meditech, and Cerner, these areas are often afterthoughts. It’s not that they didn’t offer these applications, but it certainly wasn’t where they were putting their research and development dollars.

As a vendor, you have the opportunity to go in and do the dog and pony show, and they end up picking the one with the shiniest objects, because that’s the best they can do. They’re small, and they don’t have dedicated resources.

Gamble:  Hi Sheryl, thank you so much for taking some time to speak with us. Let’s start with some information about Chapters Health System — the type of care you provide, where you’re located, things like that.

Sypek:  Sure. We’re located in the Tampa Bay area in sunny Florida. We provide care in eight counties currently, and we have a range of services across our continuum in the non-acute, non-physician practice setting. We do home health, both private duty and Medicare-certified care. We provide palliative care through consults in hospitals and nursing homes, and we have clinic-based palliative care in the community.

The largest portion of our care is hospice, although that’s starting to shift. But right now, we do hospice in seven counties with three affiliates. Across those counties, we have seven freestanding care centers, and one that’s hospital-based. That adds up to about 156 beds across seven counties. It’s a bit like running a community hospital that’s chopped up into eight pieces.

We also have our own pharmacy. Currently, we provide all of our own pharmacy services — or at least the majority of our pharmacy services — to our hospice service line. To put that in perspective, we fill about 170,000 prescriptions annually in our pharmacy.

 

Gamble:  I imagine it makes a difference having a pharmacy that’s owned by the system.

Sypek:  It does.