Sarah Richardson, CIO, NCH Healthcare System, Chapter 2

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

Chapter 2



* Focus on portals — “How can we make it seem like an engine?”

* Internally marketing initiatives

* Security — “No matter what we do, it’ll always be a when, not an if.”

* Data loss prevention

* Culture changes

* Lessons in leadership — “We got really creative at making things work.”

* “I care about the people before I care about the technology.”



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Bold Statements

Quite often, the people within the hospital can be the least informed as a population about what it is you bring to the table.

We know that healthcare will move to more of an outpatient and home setting, and we are actively partnering to figure out how to make that happen. We’ll still be on the wellness journey with our population, it’s just in the next few years, you’ll see services move out of hospitals, and we are keeping up with that trend.

It’s a true hybridization of a not-for-profit healthcare system that has a corporate relationship with an IT provider. I didn’t plan my two roles coming together 15 years later, but they absolutely have, and it’s really been the perfect alignment.

We got really, really creative at making things work. In an ideal environment, you don’t want 25 different desktop types and 30 different types of images and cobbled together network gear, but you get what you can get.

When you take the time to connect with people on a personal level and you carve out time — literally, on the calendar, one-on-one time — that’s where the rubber meets the road.

Gamble:  Just hearing about the smart rooms and then everything you’re doing with the devices, it must be a gratifying thing to see because it’s like the focus has been on laying all this groundwork, and so to see some of this technology really come to life is something that I think would be really beneficial for the users.

Richardson:  It’s fantastic because the technology is a differentiator — that’s how we look at it. And so how does technology allow our caregivers and physicians to provide better outcomes and to improve the average length of stay, the healing environment, reduced readmissions, etc. — all those things that you get measured for as an organization. You really do care about because we always say here in our environment, nobody wants to spend the night in the hospital. If you’re going to be in a hospital and you’re going to be at NCH, you already know that your caregivers have the latest technology at their fingertips, whether it’s evidence-based order sets or the fact that they can securely text one another to make sure that when you ring the call light there’s somebody exactly at your bedside with what you need, to sepsis prevention and how we continue to measure quality and be a top performer....