Sarah Richardson, CIO, NCH Healthcare System, Chapter 1

When you’re the new CIO, the first few months can be a big adjustment period, but the key, according to Sarah Richardson, is to listen. “You talk to everybody and ask a million questions and listen.” For Richardson, who joined NCH as CIO last fall, this strategy has paid off in the past, and continues to be pivotal in becoming part of the leadership team. In this interview, Richardson talks about how her experiences in the not-for-profit and corporate IT worlds helped prepare her for her current role; what she’s learned about how to build a strong team and keep staff motivated; and how to determine when it’s time to move on. She also discusses the benefits of being a fully outsourced IT shop, her team’s strong focus on population health and patient engagement, and why volunteering is so important to her.



Chapter 1



* About NCH

* Cerner in hospitals & physician practices

* Fully outsourced IT shop — “It feels like we have 80-plus people when we only have 52”

* NCH’s “matrixed” reporting structure

* Reaching HIMSS Stage 7

* “There’s no such thing as paperless.”

* Smart room technology



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Bold Statements

We’re able to really share some best practices and ideas across the board. So there’s a huge piece of being a Mayo-affiliated network from a clinical perspective, but then the operational and technology perspective have also married themselves very well.

To me, management has never been about an org chart. That is probably more true than ever in the fact that nobody in IT ‘reports to me,’ and yet we work hand in hand, side by side, all day in the trenches.

Clinical leadership and IT leadership are in lockstep, because IT cannot be the leader of a lot of these big initiatives. We just supply the pathway to get there and help people work through how to make it successfully happen.

My favorite thing about being in IT today is trying to figure out what paperless will actually be someday. There’s no such thing. We create different piles in different locations — just because we’re scanning them in, does not make it a paperless environment.

It’s a pretty exciting place to be when you hear, ‘hey, we’re going to get an X million dollar donation to finish out a technology,’ and boom, it’s on your roadmap and we’re going for it.

Gamble:  Hi Sarah, thank you so much for taking some time to speak with us today.

Richardson:  Absolutely, thank you.

Gamble:  So to give our readers and listeners some background, can you just talk a little bit about NCH Healthcare System — what you have in terms of hospitals, bed size, ambulatory, things like that?

Richardson:  Sure. NCH is a not-for-profit multi-facility healthcare system located in Naples, Florida. We have two campuses, NCH Downtown and NCH North. We provide personalized care for over 30,000 patients a year in our two-hospital, 715-bed system. We are consistently recognized for our outstanding reputation. Through Joint commission, we have accreditation in joint and hip replacement, and we’ve just recently been accredited for our stroke program. Our quality metrics consistently exceed most others. We have a Leapfrog ‘A’ rating time and again.

From a technology perspective, we are fully integrated with Cerner in both ambulatory and inpatient. We are a Cerner ITWorks client, which means we have all of our IT outsourced to Cerner, although we have 52 associates here on site for the healthcare system. We are a Most Wired organization three years running; we just applied for year four. And we were at HIMSS in April to except our HIMSS Level 7 award. In addition, we are a Mayo affiliated network member. So we became that in August of 2012. NCH is the first member of the network in Florida and the southeast r...