Q&A with SJRMC CIO John Gaede: “Community Hospital Cash Crunch Can’t be Solved Without EHR Competition & Excellent IT”

 

 The community hospital market is struggling with razor-thin margins, according to John Gaede, CIO, at San Juan Regional Medical Center; the result of increasing payroll and technology costs, along with the sunsetting of pandemic-related government programs. CIOs, he says, are in the critical position of making sure every dollar of those technology costs is spent wisely, with a strong focus on increasing operational efficiency. In this interview with healthsystemCIO Founder & Editor-in-Chief Anthony Guerra, Gaede discusses where he’s looked to make a mark at SJRMC; why he’s routing for Oracle Health to flourish, and the reasons health systems should revisit their cyber-related business-continuity planning.



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The community market, 200 beds and below, about 6,000 hospitals in the US., we represent about half that market, and we provide care to the people – the farmers and ranchers that are providing our food – and so the role of the community hospital in the United States is absolutely critical. We must have competition in the EHR space so that we can drive down costs and increase efficiency.

Community Connect is a good way to get Epic into smaller organizations, but I’ll just tell you this, I’m just going to say it: I’m a fan of Epic, however, it’s just too expensive, even the Community Connect model.

San Juan has been here for about 116 years, since 1910, the story of this hospital is remarkable. I see my charge and my watch now here at San Juan is about how do we have the organization go another 116 years. What I can tell you is, if we don’t have excellent IT, we’re not going to get there.

Anthony: Welcome to healthsystemCIO’s interview with John Gaede, CIO at the San Juan Regional Medical Center. I’m Anthony Guerra, Founder and Editor-in-Chief. John, thanks for joining me.

John: Anthony, an absolute delight and pleasure to be with you today.

Anthony: I appreciate that. We actually have been together before and this makes me feel seasoned, I think is the good word – seasoned. I was looking, doing some research for our discussion today and I saw that I had actually interviewed you in January 2011. That is a bit of aways back, long before anybody thought of a pandemic and lots of other stuff. Pretty cool, right? We’ve been kicking around awhile.

John: Absolutely. You think about all that has happened and transpired between then, quite remarkable, for sure.

Anthony: Very cool. A couple of things we talked about back then were you were moving from QuadraMed to Siemens and keeping GE in the OR and possibly using Midas which is another company that has changed owners and names, or a product that has changed owners and names. Anyway, those are some interesting names and thoughts, right?

John: Absolutely. You know what? It’s remarkable to me, when you look back, that we have many of the same challenges today. Some of those vendors have just changed names and some of them don’t exist.

Anthony: Yes, it’s interesting when you mentioned that. It seems to me that being passed around as a product or an application, it doesn’t usually do much to enhance the product or the service that someone is getting from it. Some of these things, again, have been passed around to different owners.

John: There’ll be a couple of examples of that. One would be Midas. They’ve gone through several owners since 2011, but you think about even Nuance.