Q&A with KSB Hospital CIO Ray Sharp: “As a Small Organization, You Can’t Afford to Make Blunders.”

It’s no secret that community hospitals face more than their share of challenges, whether it’s recruiting IT talent (and competing with larger organizations to retain them), securing data on a tight budget, or contending with a much smaller pool of vendors than their larger counterparts. Katherine Shaw Bethea Hospital, an 80-bed acute care facility located in rural Illinois, has dealt with all of these obstacles, and then some.

“When hospitals our size go for bids on certain projects, some vendors won’t even bid,” said Ray Sharpe, who has held the CIO role at KSB since 2018.

It’s not for the faint of heart, but as Sharp said during a recent interview with Kate Gamble, Managing Editor of healthsystemCIO, being with a community organization also comes with plenty of upside. “Every day you go to work, you feel like you’re doing something great for your community. We serve our family, our neighbors, and our friends.” And KSB has been doing so for 127 years, all while remaining staunchly independent, which is no easy feat.

During the interview, Sharp talked about what his team has done in the past few years to ensure the doors are kept open, and how they’re working to safeguard patient data while enhancing the digital experience. He also discussed KSB’s approach to rounding, his long and winding career path (and what he learned from his time away from healthcare), the value of networking and collaborating with other organizations, and the advice he would offer to new CIOs.

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Bold Statements

We don’t have to be passing information back and forth to those records. It’s just one record. Things like meds reconciliation are much easier; because we have all the notes from physician visits or from inpatient, you get the holistic view.

We send a couple of messages each month to every employee and try to make sure that we’re educating them on phishing tactics and what that might look like. We identify people who click on the most links, and we do one-on-one education with that person.

You still need to have boots on the ground in IT. You have to go to the clinics. You have to get out on the floors. You have to get to the users. You can’t resolve everything remotely.

It was a hard decision. But you have to go with what your gut tells you. For me, it was going back to healthcare and having that innate feeling that every day you’re doing something great for your community.

It was important coming in that people knew that I wasn’t going to be the reason it was successful; it was going to be because of all the resources we put together from the organization. That’s what was going to make us successful.

As a small organization, you can’t afford to make blunders. And so, you’re looking around and asking who has done this. It’s developing relationships with people who are ahead of you with some of the technologies and being able to reach out and say, ‘this product has been great’ or ‘this hasn’t worked as advertised.’ That’s been really beneficial.

 

Q&A with Ray Sharp, CIO, Katherine Shaw Bethea Hospital

Gamble:  Hi Ray, thanks so much for putting aside some time to speak. Do you want to just start by telling me a bit about the organization?

Sharp:  Sure. Katherine Shaw Bethea Hospital is a 127-year-old community hospital in Dixon, Illinois. We’re about 100 miles straight west of Chicago, probably 45 miles from the Iowa border, in a rural community. Our service area includes about 50,000 patients,