Steve Hess, CIO, University Of Colorado Health, Chapter 3

What motivates the CIO of a large health system? For Steve Hess, it’s “picturing that day when we save someone’s life through the use of informatics.” Of course, it will take — and has already taken — a great deal of blood, sweat, and tears to get to that point, from getting five hospitals and hundreds of clinics onto an integrated EHR system, to creating standardized workflows, to turning data into “actionable clinical decision support.” In this interview, Hess talks about merger that created UCHealth three years ago, why he’s a big believer in going big bang, the “why not Epic?” philosophy that has helped increase buy-in, and how collaboration is more of an art than a science. Hess also talks about the three tiers of analytics, the “real heavy lifting” when it comes to data, and the exciting direction healthcare IT is taking.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3



* Merging 3 health systems — “It’s still a work in progress.”

* MU as a carrot

* Focus on telehealth, e-visits

* 3 areas of growth: construction, affiliation & acquisition

* Reflecting on the days of mainframe-based email

* Personalized care — “It’s a journey.”



LISTEN NOW USING THE PLAYER BELOW OR CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO OUR iTUNES PODCAST FEED

Bold Statements

We ultimately used the IT systems and the IT strategic plan of integrating and optimizing common IT platforms to help bring the organization together.

That was the other cool thing about having that integrated Epic platform and then being able to take that to the other hospitals and doctors. The day you implement, you have a Meaningful Use stage 2 certified EHR and you have a lot of those workflows, best practices, and reports that you need to have to actually attest to Meaningful Use already there.

The growth strategy — new construction, affiliation and acquisition — very much is part of our future, and although we’re fairly large, we do need to get larger and have even a bigger footprint to really make population health and the new world of value-based contracting successful.

It’s going to be a journey, and there are probably going to be many, many years before we can really get to that precision-based personalized care, but a lot of the foundation is in place, and now we’re figuring out how to actually make it work.

What gets me out of bed — what takes my head off the pillow — is actually picturing that day when we’re actually saving somebody’s life through the use of informatics.

Gamble:  I wanted to talk a little bit about the merger — and actually, I’m not sure if that’s the right terminology for when the systems joined together to form UCHealth. But how did you approach different organizations coming together, and what did it take to try to create that shared culture instead of having two or three different ones?

Hess:  I think it’s still very much a work in progress. We’re still very young. When you take a step back and look at UCHealth, we’re still very young and we’re still maturing, and so, again, it’s not perfect by any stretch. What’s interesting and exciting was that we actually used IT to help bring the system together. So to get cardiologists to talk between the academic medical center and the community hospitals is not easy; it’s not easy by any stretch. To get cancer docs or primary care docs to talk is a little bit easier because of the way patients flow between primary and secondary and tertiary care settings. But we ultimately used the IT systems and the IT strategic plan of integrating and optimizing common IT platforms to help bring the organization toge...