Steve Stanic, VP & CIO, Mississippi Baptist Health System, Chapter 1

Like many CIOs, Steve Stanic has a love-hate relationship with Meaningful Use. While he takes issue with patient engagement requirements and the lack of an identifier, he still believes “it was what needed to be done.” In this interview, Stanic shares his honest thoughts about the program that has helped revolutionize the industry, and discusses the biggest projects on his plate, including the migration to McKesson Paragon, and a statewide effort to create a clinical integrated organization. He also discusses his team’s five-point engagement strategy, the valuable lesson he learned during his time in consulting, and what drew him to Mississippi Baptist.

Chapter 1



* About Mississippi Baptist

* McKesson clinicals & financials

* “Testing” Paragon at a CAH — “Standardize as much as you can.”

* Migrating from Horizon to Paragon

* Building up the clinician hub — “It’s just like anything else; you can’t get there quick enough.”

* Paragon v.13 pilot



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Bold Statements

They didn’t have anything at all. They had just an electronic billing system. They had no EHR, no clinical applications at all, so knowing that we were going to go to Paragon on the main acute side, we brought them up first.

It was great because they really embraced moving to the electronic world. You’re not trying to compare to a product that might have been in there before, so it was exciting.

We wanted to make sure that we standardized as much as we could with regards to things like order sets, physician documentation templates. That took a lot of the variation out.

One of the things we do like about Paragon is the pace of new functionality that you get is much accelerated compared to the Horizon world. You would wait a long time in Horizon to get enhancements; with Paragon, you get them at a pretty steady clip.

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

Stanic:  No problem at all.

Gamble:  Why don’t you give a little bit of information about your organization to lay some groundwork for our listeners, and then we’ll go from there.

Stanic:  Sure. I’m the vice president and CIO at Mississippi Baptist Health System, located in Jackson, Mississippi. We’re what I will consider from a Mississippi standpoint to be large acute care provider. Jackson is located in Central Mississippi. We also have three critical access hospitals we own throughout the state that act as feeders into Mississippi Baptist. We pretty much provide all what I would consider the big services — orthopedics, cardiology, large cancer center. It’s all anchored by the main center, which is about 620 beds. So that’s the background on Mississippi Baptist. I’ve been here five years now.

Gamble:  In terms of the application environment, what type of EHR system are you using in the acute care hospital?

Stanic:  In the main hospital, we’re an all McKesson shop. We’re probably their largest Paragon customer now, and we actually will be using that in our critical access hospitals as well. It’s a full suite of products, both on the financial and the clinical side, that’s the EHR. We have a lot of what I’m going to call the ancillary type applications wrapped around that, so you have cardio PACS, regular PACS, radiology, lab, all that kind of stuff.

That’s it from a clinical standpoint. We’re pretty big on CPOE as well and physician documentation, which is we’re in the final stages of rolling that out now. But that’s taken a little bit of a longer of an adoption process. So that’s where we’re at. We do have a number of clinics and physicians we own; they’re on NextGen.

Gamble:  Now as far as the critical access hospitals, you said the plan is to get them on Paragon?