Tom Pacek, VP & CIO, Inspira Health Network, Chapter 2

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

Chapter 2



* Selling ACOs to the board

* Gathering data — “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

* Physician trust factor — “The lines are blurred now.”

* South NJ’s “robust” HIE

* Merger with Underwood Memorial

* Working with Comcast to enable “complete redundancy”

* Importance of board support



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Bold Statements

We’re trying to get ahead of that curve and learn from it. We believe that in working very closely with our physicians and our patient population, we can actually bend the cost curve and maybe share some savings.

Physicians would say, ‘I don’t want anyone to see my data,’ because they’re afraid somebody’s going to steal patients from them. It’s not about that anymore. It’s about collaborating on the patient population that we all have.

We’re bringing our practices left and right. We’re acquiring practices or we’re just doing leasing arrangements for services with physician practice, but that requires us to share data back and forth. So we need to have connectivity to every single office that we connect to.

99.9 percent of the time they’re right behind me saying, ‘this makes sense, let’s go for it.’ That gives you a lot of personal job satisfaction as well, and keeps the staff happy. They know if we need to get something done, we’re going to be able to do it without a lot of difficulty.

Gamble:  You touched a little bit on population health, which is a nice little segue to talk about your strategy there. But actually, first I wanted to ask you about the ACO, Inspira Connect.

Pacek:  That’s our Medicare ACO. We’ve partnered with physicians in our community to deliver reduced costs and improve the quality of care that we provide to our Medicare patient population. We’re serving about 11,000 members; that number changes. Attribution is a funny thing, when we start to dive into what our attribution is versus what CMS may think our attribution is. It doesn’t always see eye to eye, and we have to do that justification and qualification, and it’s interesting. It’s interesting when you start to see payer data against your own data, and how it differs. That creates some challenges and some new opportunities for us to be able to engage with the payers in a different way. We all think we have the same data, but it certainly is not. We hold the key to the care — the clinical care documentation; the real details of what goes on with the patient, whereas the payers have the claims and it’s more statistical in nature and a whole lot less about the details of what really goes on when treating a patient. In this care management population health world, they’re coming together and it’s definitely going to improve the overall care we deliver to our patients.

As far as reducing cost, we’ll see. Time will tell. The fear of the whole process is that it doesn’t hav...