Susan Marino, CNIO, Hartford HealthCare, Chapter 1

It was five years ago that Hartford HealthCare began its journey to become an integrated system, and five years ago that the organization named Susan Marino as its first CNIO. The timing is no coincidence; in fact, it was a deliberate move by leadership to appoint someone with a deep knowledge of both nursing and informatics to help establish governance, guide the training process, and most importantly, ensure that the front-line staff was able to work as efficiently as possible. In this interview, Marino discusses the “never-ending” Epic rollout that’s becoming a game-changer at Hartford, how hear team is working to optimize the system without placing too much burden on physicians and nurses, and their biggest priorities for the coming year.

She also talks about her own journey, reflecting on the hurdles she faced early on and the “one win at a time” approach she took to bring nursing to the decision-making table, and emphasizes the importance of leveraging technology to increase satisfaction among nurses.

Chapter 1



* About Hartford Health

* 5 years into a “total transformation”

* The “broad perspective” CNIOs bring to the table

* Hospitals live on Epic: “Now we begin optimizing.”

* Prioritization challenges

* Leveraging MyChart to engage with patients

* Key goal for 2018: “How do we make documentation so there are less clicks?”



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Bold Statements

It’s having significant leadership responsibility looking across all of our clinical and non-clinical systems at how to optimize clinical practice, quality of patient care, and collaboration across not only nursing leadership, but all of our disciplines, truly ensuring a focus on our workforce as well ensuring that they are competent with the technologies that we are bringing forth at such a rapid rate.

Yes, our rollout for the main hospitals and clinics and provider offices is complete, but never complete. Now we begin optimizing, getting those proficiencies for our clinicians, and really looking at how do we create efficiencies.

The most difficult thing coming is, how do we whittle away at what are the most important priorities for our organization? How do we look at the key priorities across all of our spaces and what is the value add that informatics bring to those critical initiatives?

How do we make the documentation such that you have less clicks, and you have more information that is pushed to the nurses to help them understand trends of their patients or itemize what things they need to do throughout the day to be sure that they are successfully helping our patients.

Gamble:  Thank you, Susan, for taking some time to speak with us today.

Marino:  Thank you, Kate. This is a wonderful opportunity. I’m very glad to be joining you.

Gamble:  We’ve been seeing progress as far as the number of organizations with CNIOs across the country, but the numbers are still low. And so I think it’s important to get that perspective for our CIO audience and really get into your role and the importance that nursing leaders bring to an organization. I think the best way to start is by getting an overview of Hartford Health — what you have in terms of the number of hospitals, what you have in the way of ambulatory care, and where you’re located.

Marino:  Sure. I’d like to first say that it has been an extraordinary opportunity for me to have come down this pathway. It was never something that I dreamed about coming out of nursing school. I really respect and admire the individuals that I worked with who had the vision to develop this over 20 years now since I began in informatics. Most if not all of it has been within Hartford Healthcare, starting at Hartford Hospital.

Right now,