Theresa Meadows, SVP & CIO, Cook Children’s Health Care System, Chapter 2

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

Chapter 2



* Pediatric EHRs & the functionality gap

* Partnering with athenahealth & Meditech

* “We really worked hand-in-hand to build that pediatric functionality.”

* Challenges with dosing, growth charts & vaccine schedules

* Harnessing the power of texting

* Innovation in focus — “If we lose sight, nobody will have their eye on the ball.”



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Bold Statements

We’ve shared our content. We’ve shared our builds. So hopefully people don’t have to relearn this every time they go through the process, because it takes a village, and to redo something from scratch every time really does not make sense.

Things like growth charts and weight-based dosing and vaccine schedules — those are the things that pediatricians and specialists live and die by. And so not to have those things in the EHR is very frustrating.

As we go through this patient engagement transition, people need information at the right time. It’s great that it’s in a portal and it’s sitting there, but if I don’t need it, I’m not going to go in and look for it.

I encourage my team to always be thinking: is this an innovative approach? Is there a new way to go about this than the standard? But it is hard — it’s very hard, because it is the thing that gets left on the cutting table.

Gamble:  It’s interesting what you said about what Athena has done because we’re starting to see some information come out from studies. The Journal of American Medical Informatics Association did a study and more than half of respondents said that EHR systems don’t have the necessary functions for pediatric care. Luckily it looks like the tide is starting to turn, but it seems like this has been a challenge for a while for pediatric organizations.

Meadows:  Yes, it’s been a huge challenge and I will site one of my bandwagons that I’ve been on is really trying to partner with our EHR vendors, because the systems are designed for adults — that’s just the larger population of people that use medical care. And so we here at Cook have really made an extra effort to work very closely with our primary EHR vendors to ensure that our pediatric needs are being met.

One of the things that we do here is we meet quarterly with Athena executives and Meditech executives to talk about what things are working well from a pediatric perspective, and what things are not working as well as expected, and how do we work together to help with the design of that content or the design of those needs to ensure that all pediatric providers can benefit from the work that we’ve done. With Athena, we were their first pediatric customer, so a lot of their pediatric knowledge was driven from our implementation. We really worked hand-in-hand with them to build that pediatric functionality. And I’m very pleased with the outcome,