Skip Rollins, CIO & CISO, Freeman Health System, Chapter 2

When it comes to partnering with vendors, there’s one thing a CIO needs to keep in mind: if it isn’t working, you must be willing to walk away. Skip Rollins has done just that, but he’s also been involved with co-development projects that have been very successful for both parties. The key, he says, is putting trust in each other. In this interview, the CIO of Freeman Health System talks about the pros and cons of partnerships, along with the major decision his team faces in selecting a core EHR vendor, one that he believes can’t be made in a vacuum, and can’t be rushed.

Rollins also opens up about his past experience in consulting and why he decided to return to the CIO world, how his organization is dealing with recruiting challenges, and why he believes continuous learning is a critical component of the health IT leader’s role.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* Patient flow initiative: “It’s been very successful.”

* 500-600 referrals per month

* Leveraging a community Access portal to “take the burden off our scheduling office.”

* The “pivot point” with moving the cloud

* Vendor partnerships: “It just made sense.”

* Pros and cons of co-development

* “There has to be a lot of trust on both sides.”



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Bold Statements

We’re not getting negative feedback from our users about taking too long to do things now. So, from an IT perspective, it’s been very successful. But from a patient-care perspective, it’s been great, because we’re getting the right people in contact with the patients more efficiently.

Pulling that workload off the people that work in that particular office and having a large part of the information they were gathering in a manual way done in an automated way has been a win for us, because it just makes us more efficient.

There’s always hesitation when you give up control, and so selling the concept of the soundness of the solution, the security of the solution, the reliability of it was something that we spent some time doing with our leadership team.

There has to be a lot of trust on both sides to do it, because it’s a leap of faith for both of us — for them, it’s trusting that we will provide the resources and we have the skill sets necessary to do that. And for us, we’re making a commitment to a product that’s not really there yet.

Gamble:  Did it start with a pilot or a smaller scale, and then grow from there?

Rollins:  We did an initial pilot of a smaller group of folks we work with to make sure that we had the processes all worked out and make sure the software did everything we wanted it to do, and then we began to expand it pretty rapidly once we proved that it worked. It’s now up and running, and we’re very happy with the result. We’re not getting negative feedback from our users about taking too long to do things now. So, from an IT perspective, it’s been very successful. But from a patient-care perspective, it’s been great, because we are getting the right people in contact with the patients more efficiently.

Gamble:  Right. It’s one of those wins that’s really nice to have.

Rollins:  Absolutely. It was one where after you finish it, you wonder why you didn’t do it sooner but it was successful. The TeleTracking folks have been great. They worked with us, they understood our processes, and we as an organization have been able to adapt to some new workflows that made sense for all of us, and it’s turned out really well.

Gamble:  Okay. And as far as the community access portal, this was also with TeleTracking?

Rollins:  It was.