Randy Gaboriault, SVP & CIO, Christiana Care Health System, Chapter 2

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

Chapter 2



* Reporting/BI vs. true analytics

* CMMI grant to reduce readmissions

* “Healthcare is really underutilizing big data.”

* The flawed approach to analytics

* Embedded teams that “live, breathe and understand the problem.”

* Fostering innovation

* Time management challenge — “How do we flip that?”



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Bold Statements

As human beings, we’re not really very good at seeing things or patterns that we’re not looking for. So we’ve been focused for the last three years on developing a specific capability to effectively be able to do that

Let’s understand it. Let’s be able to explain it. Let’s actually begin to predict who, and then begin to move upstream and actually modify things that are happening to prevent the readmission.

For the most part, all industries are really just at the opening chapter for this. We look at these tiny slivers of information. We’re not looking really big and wide at an ecosystem of information.

We’ve taken on an innovation challenge to think about how we actually begin to solve those issues and create a much higher fidelity, quality experience and quality outcome by designing novel solutions to problems, and we do that by bringing together the people that sort of experience the problem from different perspectives.

As an organization, you spend a tremendous amount of time just keeping and managing the present, and very little time thinking about the future. And so our objective, is how do we flip that? How do we actually spend much more of our energy focused on where we need to go? That’s the challenge.

Gamble:  When you talk about everything you have about going in a large organization, I can imagine that the whole issue of managing the data is a big priority. So I wanted to talk about your strategy there and some of the work that you’re doing or plan to do with business intelligence and analytics.

Gaboriault:  Sure, in fact, it’s an area we’ve been actually focused very heavily for a lot of different reasons, obviously including the changing healthcare commerce framework as well. I think that like a lot of folks now, it’s helping our constituents understand the difference between reporting and BI and analytics. To me, when I think about BI or the specific reporting component in healthcare, I start to think about units per thousand — how many falls per thousand, how many readmissions, how many this or that per thousand. And getting a diagnostic on how are we performing looking at that information; having designated teams of individuals looking at that and determining how to execute performance improvement.

The analytics is a really different piece. For us, it’s about will the person with brown eyes that had a stent placed on Tuesday with a BMI of 25 be readmitted? And by the way,