Russell Branzell, President & CEO, CHIME, Chapter 2

Anyone who knows Russ Branzell knows that he doesn’t shy away from making big statements, and he doesn’t mince words. So when the CHIME President says, “Everyone has to up their game,” he means it — and it be would be wise to listen. In this interview, Branzell talks about the skillsets all health IT leaders will need to help transform the industry, what he hopes to see in the Meaningful Use stage 3 final rule, and the enormous impact a 90-day reporting period would have on both hospital and physician practices. He also discusses CHIME’s Patient ID challenge, the personnel moves that he believes will help improve the organization, why CIOs shouldn’t be afraid to plagiarize, and what attendees can expect at the upcoming Fall Forum.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* Policy leadership changes

* Mari Savickis & Leslie Kriegstein — “True rock stars in the industry.”

* “Critique by itself can be just construed as complaining.”

* CHIME Technologies — “Focusing on new and innovative areas.”

* 2015 Fall Forum

* “We’ve made a big effort to make it not only extremely valuable, but also extremely relaxing.”

* CIO 3.0 — “Everyone has to up their game.”



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Bold Statements

We try never to provide critique without the opportunity to also provide suggested solutions or improvements. Critique by itself can be just construed as complaining.

We really created this for the purposes of looking for innovative new ways to support our members. It could be through technology solutions, it could be through unique information sharing, it could be through purchasing power for our medium and small organizations that are maybe not part of a large GPO.

We’re very fortunate that we have a lot of people willing to share their information. The process of gathering information from others and then tweaking it for yourself is so much more time efficient than trying to be constantly innovating within your organization.

Everyone’s got to up their game for us to be successful. And what we really have coined as the CIO 3.0 is the new transformational leader. Their job is to really help guide, direct, facilitate, and support a pretty radical transformation period of time in healthcare.

There’s just a pace of change that’s so stressful that life itself is getting out of balance. If it was not out of balance before, it’s now so extremely out of balance that we’re seeing burnout, we’re seeing severe stress, we’re seeing things that we haven’t historically seen.

Gamble:  In terms of some of the moves that the organization CHIME has made, I wanted to talk about some of the new hires. You have a new VP of Federal Affairs — can you talk about what this appointment means for CHIME’s members?

Branzell:  Mari Savickis is our VP of Federal Affairs. Most recently over the last few years, we’ve always had two positions in Washington. One of our staff members left last year, so we took an opportunity to really look at this a little different than we have in the past, which was more of a vertical-type staffing with a senior person and a junior person.

What we said was, these areas are too critical not to have a great senior person in place for each of them, so we’re very fortunate that we were able to have Mari come on board. And her specialty really will be to focus all of her efforts to represent CHIME; to assist our members across the board to do education both within the industry, as well as within Washington on the federal affairs side, which is mostly the agencies, the White House and working in building those relationships and spending time really representing our organizations,