Tom Pacek, VP & CIO, Inspira Health Network, Chapter 1

One of the biggest challenges for health systems is to be aggressive and stay ahead of the curve while also maintaining a healthy bottom line. And although there is no magic bullet to achieving that balance, one key ingredient, according to Tom Pacek, is having a board that’s committed to excellence and is willing to take risks. In this interview, he talks about his top priorities, including migrating ambulatory onto a single EHR platform, sustaining Inspira’s Medicare ACO, and creating an infrastructure to ensure redundancy as the organization continues to grow. Pacek also discusses the blurring of lines when it comes to data ownership, how he deals with physician trust issues, his team’s strong focus on care coordination, and his strategy for keeping the staff engaged.

Chapter 1



* About Inspira

* Soarian in hospitals, ambulatory migrating to Cerner

* Physician bakeoff to select a system

* Inspira’s “enterprise mentality”

* MU attestation on physician side — “The biggest gap is the patients.”

* Onsite portal signups & tests

* “You can’t control the patient; the best you can do is educate them and get them engaged.”



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Bold Statements

We were trying to get out in front of the curve and adopt the ambulatory Soarian product, which we were in the process of implementing. We shifted gears quickly after the Cerner announcement and got some feedback on that, and didn’t think that was a viable option anymore.

The biggest gap is really the patients. They’ll sign up for the patient portal, but to be able to send information back and forth with the patient, that’s not happening very rapidly. I don’t know whether they’re unwilling or they’re just nonresponsive to that.

We just wish the rules weren’t so strict and so stringent as to make it certain percentages. We’re just trying to do the best we can and work with our patients. You can’t control the patient; the best you can do is try to educate them and get them engaged.

They’re starting to recognize that we’re headed down the right path; people are doing the right thing and trying to become meaningful users, even if we’re not meeting making the criteria levels.

Gamble:  Hi Tom, thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.

Pacek:  Hi Kate, you’re more than welcome. I look forward to the dialog.

Gamble:  Me too. To give our readers and listeners some background information, can you just talk a little bit about Inspira Health Network — what you have in terms of hospitals, bed size, ambulatory, things like that.

Pacek:  Inspira is multiple-merged organization over time, in our most recent merger, we went from two hospitals to three hospitals three years ago; it’ll be three years this November. Our bed size now is 720. We have three acute care facilities. We have a health center with 60 behavioral health beds, so out of that 720, 60 of them are located at the health center. We have all the typical services — ER, pharmacy, lab, and things like that.

We have a very large ambulatory offering now with three urgent care centers and a fourth soon to be opened. We have over 80 owned physicians in a multispecialty group. Primary care is probably 50 or 60 percent of that group. The rest are multiple specialties, including midwifery. We have a home health agency that covers two counties of the three we service. We’re in a geographic area in southern New Jersey that covers about 1200 square miles, so it’s a very large portion of the southern part of the state.

In terms of acute care, we’re the game in town in the southern part of the state. Our latest acquisition or merger was Woodbury Underwood Medical Center, which joined Inspira two and a half years ago. There is some competition for acute care beds in...