Rick Allen, CIO, Southern Regional Medical Center, Chapter 3

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

Chapter 2

Chapter 3



* Population health with Emory — “They’re able to access information much easier.”

* Reducing readmissions with paramedicine

* Meditech’s portal functionality — “It doesn’t fit our patient population.”

* From outdated systems to being a Horizon development site

* The mentor that “helped moderate” him

* Being the new CIO — “It’s all about interacting with people. The strategy will come.”



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Bold Statements

They’re able to access information much easier than what we can do from here. Because for us to do it, it’s someone sitting down writing reports and working through the data repository in Meditech to write reports. It’s having to hunt and peck to work our way through just because we don’t have that level of expertise on staff.

They’re not meds compliant, they’re not treatment compliant, they’re not following up with their primary care physician on discharge or anything else, because they just can’t. So we send them home, and two weeks later they’re back.

A lot of the reason I stayed for as long as I did was that I learned a lot from him and I had allegiance to him from working with him and trying to get everything from him that I possibly could on how to be a CIO and how to be a CIO the right way.

Don’t be a technology guy, be a people person. If you’re a CIO, you need to be out with the rest of the management team. Don’t lock yourself into the IT department and work in a vacuum. Get out and build relationships. Understand the temperature of the organization — what everybody’s going through and what the pain points are.

For a new CIO coming in, it’s all about interacting with people. The strategy will come, the projects will present themselves, and you’ll be able to prioritize. And sometimes you’re going to guess wrong, but for the most part, you’ll know what the important things are and you’ll know what the organization can handle.

Gamble:  You briefly had mentioned population health before, what are you doing there or what are you looking at being able to do on that front?

Allen:  I think the first thing is just being able to access the information to understand what the populations look like. We’re feeding all of our information to Emory for them to be able to help us manage and help give us access to information that we can’t necessarily get too easily in the systems that we have. They’re a big Cerner shop and they’ve got the Cerner population management system in place and the Cerner HIE and they’re rolling everything up there, so they’re able to access information much easier than what we can do from here. Because for us to do it, it’s someone sitting down writing reports and working through the data repository in Meditech to write reports.