Rick Allen, CIO, Southern Regional Medical Center, Chapter 1

When you’re being offered a spot on a C-suite that has seen significant turnover, there are really two choices: run, or do some investigating. Rick Allen chose the latter, having a long conversation with the outgoing CIO that enabled him to accept the role with eyes wide open. And even though may have questioned the decision when the CEO stepped down just a few weeks into his tenure, Allen has stayed the course, thanks largely to an IT staff that has remained in place and has bought into the organization’s philosophy. In this interview, he discusses the challenges of moving forward while keeping costs low, how he plans to bring more relevance to IT, and the mentors who showed him “how to be a CIO the right way.”

Chapter 1



* About Southern Regional

* Making data “push, not pull”

* Change management — “You struggle with how much the organization can absorb at once.”

* Yellow-lighting projects

* Research before the role to walk in “with your eyes open.”

* Cleaning up a fragmented IT environment



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Bold Statements

It’s the whole BI thing — it’s building dashboards, it’s publishing metrics, it’s getting things back out in front of people for them to work from and making it push, not pull. I don’t want people to have to go query information that they need to be able to make a decision.

With a new CEO comes new thoughts and new growth strategies and new alignments, so you’ve got the changes that are coming from there as we’re trying to push things through. So I’ve really got to prioritize. We have things queued up that we haven’t rolled out yet, just because it’s too much to absorb at once.

We had a long talk about what his struggles were and why he left. We really went through all of it end-to-end and had conversations about everything from staff to strategies and plans that he had in place for how he wanted to move forward.

It helps when you’re walking with your eyes open. It would have been much worse to get here and find out the issues that were in place or find out the things that he wasn’t able to accomplish and why he wasn’t able to accomplish them.

Gamble:  Hi Rick, thanks so much for taking some time to speak with healthsystemCIO.com.

Allen:  No problem. Thanks for having me.

Gamble:  Sure. To give our readers and listeners a little background, can you just talk about Southern Regional Medical Center — what you have in terms of hospital beds, ambulatory, things like that?

Allen: We call ourselves a safety net hospital on the south side of Atlanta. We’re just south of the Atlanta airport. We’re a 331-licensed bed hospital with an offsite ambulatory surgery center and offsite imaging center. We’ve got about eight physician practices that are affiliated or actually owned.

Gamble:  And then as far as Emory Healthcare, what’s the relationship there?

Allen: It’s a management agreement, so they put a CEO and a CFO here to help run the hospital for us. I spent 12 years in another hospital system here in the Atlanta metro area. In the amount of time that I was there for those 12 years, they had five CIOs here. They had like six CFOs, they had four or five CEOs. So they’ve had a huge churn in the executive staff.

The partnership with Emory gives them some stability. It gives them some continuity. If something happens and one of them leaves for some reason, gets another posting or does something else, there’s at least knowledge transfer for the next person coming in to be able to keep moving. So they also help us with strategy, they help us with marketing, they help us with government relations. From an IT standpoint, I do interface some with the CIO there just to make sure that we’re kind of aligned, we’re working together on population health,