Theresa Meadows, SVP & CIO, Cook Children’s Health Care System, Chapter 1

Twenty years ago, Theresa Meadows took a rather big risk: she said to the CIO at her organization, “I want your job.” The courageous move paid off, and she gained a mentor that helped steer her toward her ultimate goal. Now, Meadows serves as Senior VP and CIO at Cook Children’s, one of just a few integrated pediatric health systems in the country. In this interview, she talks about how Cook Children’s is partnering with vendors to make EHR systems more pediatric-friendly, what they’ve done to dramatically increase portal usage, and the groundbreaking work her team is doing with medical homes. Meadows also discusses the tricky transition from nursing to IT, how her nursing background has helped shape her leadership strategy, and the mistake CIOs can’t afford to make.

Chapter 1



* About Cook Children’s

* Focus on ambulatory growth — “It’s critical to our overall system strategy.”

* Meditech in hospital, athenahealth in physician practices

* Upgrading to Meditech 6.1

* Enabling mobility — “Clinicians are always in motion.”

* Telehealth pilot

* MU reporting metrics — “They’re still mostly very adult-driven.”



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Bold Statements

Nurses, doctors, and lab techs are always in motion; to have something that’s static and stuck in one place is really not conducive to their workflow. So I’m very excited about mobile opportunities, and it’s good to see our partners really embrace moving in that direction.

It also has an added layer of complexity to any kind of IT project when you’re constructing a building which has lots of other IT and doing an upgrade at the same time. It’s probably a little risky, but also can be very rewarding.

We see a good opportunity to follow up with kids for specific disease states at home. So we’re really excited about what telehealth can bring to that population, and hopefully that will begin to allow more and more use of that technology.

We saw Meaningful Use as something we were already striving for before the regulations came out, so for us it’s more about being prepared, and if there are penalties that begin with the Medicaid population, then we will be prepared for that.

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

Meadows:  Thanks so much, Kate. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Gamble:  Great. So to get started, can you just give our readers and listeners a brief overview of your organization, in terms of what you have for hospitals and where you’re located, things like that?

Meadows:  Cook Children’s Health Care System is located in Fort Worth, Texas. We’re a large, not-for-profit pediatric integrated delivery system. What that means is we have the ability to see our children really from beginning to end. We have a large hospital as part of our health system, 400-plus beds with a 100-bed neonatal intensive care unit. So a very large hospital that we take care of really sick kids in. We also have two joint ventures that we do with ambulatory surgery centers in different areas of the Fort Worth Metroplex.

We have a large home health business. That’s a little bit unique in that our home health company really only provides services to kids who need special care in their homes, which also includes durable medical equipment as well as prosthetics. We actually make some of our own prosthetics, which is a pretty neat process for our kids. We have a large physician network; we employ around 350 physicians, which are comprehensive of primary care and specialty care, with about 80 locations now. The number continues to change on a regular basis. We’re growing pretty steadily in our ambulatory areas. We probably will add six or seven more clinics in the next year coming up.