Q&A with Tampa General Hospital’s Senior Director of IT Enterprise Imaging Steven Johnson & Director of IT Matthew Butler: “Enterprise Imaging Defines the Direction, But Decision Points Characterize the Journey”

It sounds simple and it makes sense – to ease the burden on clinicians that comes with logging into multiple systems, and thus improve patient safety, all data should reside in one place. When it comes to imaging, that means all images, regardless of how they were created or where they are currently housed (think PACS), should either come into the EHR or be easily accessible via it. What’s more, to further facilitate workflow, all images should reside in one PACS. But, for a number of practical reasons, pursuing such a strategy can’t be followed at all costs. That’s because images, unlike a lot of other clinical data, are massive and, thus, large numbers of them don’t lend themselves to easy migration (as one might want to do if sunsetting one PACS in order to reduce vendor sprawl). In this interview with healthsystemCIO Founder & Editor-in-Chief Anthony Guerra, Tampa General Hospital’s Senior Director of IT Enterprise Imaging Steven Johnson & Director of IT & Clinical Ancillary Systems Matthew Butler, discuss the challenges and tradeoffs that come with moving a health system in an enterprise imaging direction.



LISTEN HERE USING THE PLAYER BELOW OR SUBSCRIBE THROUGH YOUR FAVORITE PODCASTING SERVICE. 



Bold Statements

… there’s a lot of consolidation, and what happens is you have these leftover systems and, if you took a look at your stack – your information stack, the technology that you have – and you wanted to standardize on one system, it becomes a very complex problem. Oftentimes, it’s financially driven, because to get off all of your helper systems and disparate systems, there’s a lot of dollars that follow that to migrate and standardize.

There’s a world outside of radiology that we have to be in tune to as imaging experts.

We’re on site every single day. We have a physical presence in the office. I know that not every organization is like that, based on size, but I do think that’s one thing that might set us apart, that the industry might need to key in on for future success.

Anthony: Welcome to healthsystemCIO’s interview with Steve Johnson, Senior Director of IT Enterprise Imaging with Tampa General Hospital and Matthew Butler, Director of IT & Clinical Ancillary Systems, also with Tampa General. I’m Anthony Guerra, Founder and Editor-in-Chief. Steve and Matt, thanks for joining me.

Steve: Thanks for having us, Anthony.

Anthony: All right. Great.

Matthew: Thanks for having us.

Anthony: Awesome. Thank you. Steve, let’s start with you. You want to tell me a little bit about your organization and your role.

Steve: We work for Tampa General Hospital. We are an academic medical health system located in Florida. We’re currently in expansion mode. Matt and I’s roles are over Enterprise Imaging for the health system. Our scope is radiology, imaging, Enterprise imaging, anything that has imaging in it touches our scope.

Anthony: Very good. Matt, a little bit about your role.

Matthew: Yes, absolutely. Pretty similar to Steve. We are somewhat of a pair, if you will. Steve and I worked together for a long time and basically, Steve pretty much summed it up. One thing he missed on was inpatient, outpatient, whatever it is imaging wise, that’s really our realm. We are traditional IT guys at our core, your typical server stuff, things like that, we have background in that. We came up doing all those kinds of things, supporting those things.

But as the industry has grown and progressed, acquisitions and things like that,