Tom Pacek, VP & CIO, Inspira Health Network, Chapter 3

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

Chapter 3



* Easing staff burden with consultants & interns

* Work-life balance

* Getting personal with staff — “It’s importance to me to know what’s going on with them.”

* “Dynamic” HIT industry

* Cutting edge, not “bleeding edge”

* Evolution of physician engagement

* Benefits of HIMSS involvement



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Bold Statements

We build consulting dollars into the budget process to help alleviate the staff, so they’re not looking at it as ‘somebody’s trying to take my job from me,’ but, ‘hey, they respect the fact that I need some support.’

We tell our employees, when you’re home, you’re home. Try to stay home. We have on-call people. They’ll take care of the stuff after hours and all weekends. Don’t worry about it.

This is the most interesting time in my 35 years in healthcare IT. It is absolutely very dynamic. We don’t even know what the future holds for us; we just know it’s going to be different than it is today.

I wouldn’t say we were bleeding edge, but we like to be on the cutting edge of things as much as possible. As long as we stay aggressive and we stay mindful of our expenses and do a good job there, I see this organization just continuing to move forward at a rapid pace.

IT people are a little bit different than the rest of the executive team in that we like to be collaborative with our competitors. We don’t necessarily see it as a competition, because we share common problems and we’re all trying to help each other out.

Gamble:  Another big issue is the ability to recruit and retain top people — you have so much competition everywhere. I wanted to talk about your approach.

Pacek:  You know, that’s a good one. We were one of the top hospitals last year as far as employee satisfaction goes, and it really comes from a couple things. One, we’re doing a lot of exciting things here. If you’re looking to get experience with a bunch of different technologies and a bunch of different roles, we’re certainly a place where you want to come. We promote from within, so that gives the existing employee base a nice satisfaction. We’ve created levels over time so that when you have a systems analyst, you’ve got a systems analyst that’s capable of X. You have the next level systems analyst which adds some new responsibilities to that, as well as some financial benefits. So we have three levels of many of our most popular positions — business analyst, clinical analyst, informatics positions, even technicians. We have different levels of technicians. It’s not always possible to move from one position to a completely different position; there might not be something open. But for people have been in their role and they’re happy,