Robin Sarkar, CIO, Lakeland Regional Health System, Chapter 2

When it comes to retaining top talent, many organizations are missing the point, says Robin Sarkar, who believes the key is to focus less on annual performance reviews and more on meaningful dialogue. What that means, says Lakeland Regional’s CIO, is asking questions that focus on where employees want to go and how leadership can help them get there. In this interview, he talks about how this strategy has helped strengthen his team, as well as the work they’re doing to bring data closer to the point of care and push population health forward. Sarkar also talks about why innovation can’t happen without failures, and what it was like coming to healthcare from the business world.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* Key enablers for technology: leadership support & talent

* “Once in a while, you will stumble.”

* Turning failures into learning experiences

* Working “hand in hand” with clinicians

* Population health & the “cultural change”

* Patient engagement — “We have a lot of catching up to do.”



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Bold Statements

They work with us hand in hand from the design through execution and testing, so it’s not an IT project coming out of a box.

We consider Lakeland Health to be a learning organization, and so it’s really important is to make sure that we learn — not only in smaller groups, but that we translate this learning enterprise-wide so that we can all learn from specific incidents.

Population health moved the focus from healthcare to trying to remain healthy in the community, from working with people within our control to working in the community.

How, through technology and through Healthy Planet, can we locate our high-risk patients who have cardiac challenges or diabetes or other chronic diseases, catch them early, and make sure they continue to stay on the healthy path?

When you look at the way the healthcare industry engages its patients compared to other industries, we still find ourselves needing to run a little faster in terms of how to get patients more involved in their treatment and their health, and how to make medical records as simple for you and me to access as it would be to access your bank record.

Gamble:  When you think about the philosophy that Lakeland has when it comes to technologies, the organization seems to be willing to pilot different things. I would think along with that comes not having a fear of failure. What’s your philosophy in that regard?

Sarkar:  That’s a great point, because when you try new things, once in a while you will stumble. There are two key enablers for technology at Lakeland. Number one, which I find really unusual and certainly beneficial for a CIO, is strong leadership support. From our CEO, throughout our leadership team, there’s tremendous support of technology around our leadership table. In fact, our CEO Dr. Loren Hamel attends the Epic conferences and attends many technology events. He considers technology a key enabler for healthcare.

The second important enabler for us at Lakeland Health is talent. We do a lot to make sure that we have absolutely the best talent in our in-house IT team to make sure that we can provide the best support for our clinical folks. We do sometimes have setbacks and failures.

One of the ways we try and mitigate it is by ensuring our clinicians are involved. We have an innovative program called 3C where we have 12 or 15 physicians who are involved with us in their respective areas, whether it’s an ED physician, a radiologist, a primary care physician, or surgeons from different areas.