Randy Gaboriault, SVP & CIO, Christiana Care Health System, Chapter 1

In 2010, Randy Gaboriault left an industry that thrived on innovation to answer the call of another that “had not incurred disruption in decades.” Healthcare, he believed, offered him an opportunity to “reshape it from my backyard,” and he accepted. Five years later, Gaboriault is leading a top team at Christiana Care that is focused on creating a ‘true community health record’ and harnessing the power of predictive analytics to improve outcomes. In this interview, he talks about the major IT plans on his plate, what he believes are the core competences of health care, what leaders should mean to their teams, and what surprised him most about the CIO role. He also discusses the innovation challenge that was issued to his team, and the trend that CIOs must work to reverse.

Chapter 1



* About Christiana Care

* Cerner as “core backbone on the inpatient side”

* Migrating ambulatory onto one platform

* Co-development to integrate Cerner & Soarian Financials

* “It’s how you get data at the right place and the right time to create a richer patient experience.”

* Delaware HIN — “It creates a platform to really start thinking about team-based care.”



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Bold Statements

Let’s ask questions here in the health services space and actually apply those hypotheses into our own environment, and then, as a result of that, publish specific results into the ecosystem based on what we found in our environment.

Patients don’t live in a closed ecosystem, they live in the real world where they’re going to get either diagnostics and/or emergent care at different points, and they don’t live in a closed convenient system for us as a provider.

The state and the constituents and providers are able to rally very quickly around something, and I’d say that is definitely a catalyst, which I think really helped the HIE flourish as well as build functionality and get real adoption.

The number of services and value-creating functions that we’ve been able to build on it have just been amazing, and I think it’s a true testament to thinking about what’s important to the community, to the patient, in how we actually begin to reduce friction for how information moves.

 Gamble:  Hi Randy, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today.

Gaboriault:  Thanks, Kate. It’s great to be here.

Gamble:  Just to give our readers and listeners a little bit of background information, can you just talk a little bit about Christiana Care in terms of your number of hospitals, which you have in the way of ambulatory, things like that?

Gaboriault:  At a high level, we have two acute care centers. Just a little bit of background, the organization was founded in 1888. We’re the largest private employer in the state of Delaware. We’re also the fourth largest in the Philadelphia metropolitan region. From a healthcare perspective, depending on which index you’re scoring against, we’re somewhere probably between the 15th and the 25th largest institution in the nation. We’re a teaching center as well, so we’ve got somewhere in the range around 300 residents and fellows in our environment. From a size and a scale perspective, we’re probably somewhere around the $2.5 to $3 billion range, more precisely probably about $2.7 to $2.8 billion in gross revenue as an organization. But we’re affectively a community health provider where we also look at ourselves in ways where we are able to actually relate to a lot of different organizations because we perform in a lot different dimensions, one of which is as a teaching center that’s sort of the academic component so we feel like we’re able to make a connection that direction as well. Our CEO, who just retired in the fall, was the president of the council of teaching ho...