In Part 2 of his video interview with www.whatismeaningful.com, Rick Schooler, senior vice president of information services and CIO of Orlando Health, shares his thoughts on adapting to a changing healthcare environment. Watch Part 1 of the interview with Orlando Health . Below is the video transcript.
What is Meaningful Editor: The healthcare industry changes daily. What is important to you in terms of having agility in the marketplace?
Rick Schooler: Well, we often find ourselves as healthcare providers reacting to a change in our environment, whether it’s a local change or whether it’s a regulatory change, we have to be able to respond to a medical situation, a financial situation, a regulatory situation. So, we’re always doing our business if you will with the understanding that at any given moment something is going to change. And something is going to cause us to either have to pursue another technology, pursue another form of governance, pursue another form of care. It’s just the nature of the beast. It’s the nature of our business. Change in inevitable.
If we get ourselves in a situation with particular regard to healthcare information technologies that require, a substantial amount of investment to implement, support and maintain and we find that we’re constantly being constrained by that technology, be it the actual stuff – the hardware and the networks and the software – or the way the software actually works, we’ll be in a perpetual state of frustration so the only way to get through that is to ensure that we’ve got a tool set in place and in particular - with regard to electronic health records - a technology platform that will allow us to flow and to move and to change and to back and forth if you will with the changes that constantly are coming upon us as providers. So, agility is something that has to be woven into the…into the fabric of the technology as well as the mindsets of the people that use it.
WIM Editor: Architecture and technologies that are open to change is important to you. Why?
Schooler: To be open as an organization working with any particular vendor and, you know, the funny thing about technologies is that there is just so many of them…right? We have a lot of different technology platforms in an organization like ours to accomplish what we have to accomplish in managing our information systems and technologies. We have to be certainly open from a standpoint of being able and willing to learn new things and to adapt what did work yesterday now has to change and be different tomorrow.
So, there’s a certain amount of give and take that has to occur between, I’ll say any customer and any vendor of technology. Our failure to be open to a different technology or a different way of doing something with a technology or with a particular vendor of the technology will severely limit our abilities to transform and to grow and to change with the organization. We just can’t buy a technology and put a fence around it and say ‘okay, now we’ve got that in place, now we’re done so now let’s move onto the next one’….What we just put in place as we all know will change. It will become obsolete.
So we have to constantly be watching what is going on in the marketplace. We have to constantly learning new skills, being aware of what’s going on and having open dialog with many vendors and particularly as a healthcare provider, our vendor of our electronic health record platform has to be a very special relationship because we’re running our core business on this technology. And our ability to successfully work with and manage and negotiate and coordinate with our vendor partner is….it’s of incredible importance. We will fall flat on our face without an open and collaborative relationship with our vendors. There’s just no way around it.
Now, with regard to technologies being open, the last thing we want to do is to spend many millions of dollars on hardware and networks and different types of software only to learn that in a short period of time it no longer works or it no longer works well with other technologies so we have to ensure that the solutions that are put in place play well and behave well with a variety of other systems and technologies because that’s the nature of the beast in an organization of our size and bigger is that there are a lot of technologies and this is very complex…it’s industrial strength complexity and a lot of people in our industry over the years have not really revered it to be as such, but it is. And it requires skill sets, it requires a huge amount of investment, it requires a lot of planning and thinking and it requires technologies that work today and work tomorrow that are, in fact, designed and engineered to be open and flexible and to work well with the other many technologies that we use in healthcare.
WIM Editor: Looking ahead now in terms of nation’s healthcare system five years from now, how well do you think Orlando Health is positioned?
Schooler: Survival in the future of healthcare is going to require a lot of things but at the core of that we believe is for information to be a staple. It’s not what we deliver as a service because we’re an organization that puts our patients first…it’s about patient care…it’s about managing the health of a patient through our healthcare continuum. So that’s the business we’re in.
But, in order to effectively accomplish that both from a productivity standpoint and from a cost standpoint and most importantly from a quality standpoint – patient safety – are we doing the right things the right way with the right resources at the right time? It has to be founded on a solid information architecture. And as you know, healthcare is a very complex business. It’s been said more than once by many experts that it’s probably the most complex business there is. While at the same time we’re an organization who delivers a mission driven service, patient care, we’re also a business. And we have to be efficient, we have to be productive, we have to do things right the first time. And without a solid information model architecture that is supported by technologies at the point of care as well as in back office, as well as mobile, outside the walls of our respective organizations in real time, we will not achieve it.
It’s not going to be possible to survive in the future without being able to support operations with efficient technologies and at the same time, on the other end, and we call that the end game, being able to mine that information, warehouse it and mine it and learn from it. And manage our business in a way that other industries have done for years. So, this is…this is not something new but in healthcare because of the forces that are in play as a provider organization, we’re going to be forced to be more efficient, to be more productive, and to improve the quality of the care. Our reimbursement is going to depend on it. Our very existence is going to depend on our ability to effectively manage information about our patients…not just when they’re with us but also now when they’re at home…before they see us for a given encounter as well as after. So, the landscape is definitely shifting.
As we all know, the reimbursement we receive as providers is going to be more and more focused and based on the outcomes we deliver. And if we fail to deliver effective outcomes….if we fail to reach the quality goals we set…if we fail to be efficient and productive as a provider organization, we won’t…we won’t make it. And I think that’s a, you know, a message that the entire industry has finally received but it sure has taken a lot of time and energy for us to get there. But the good news is that we are there as an industry… we understand now that going forward, our ability to achieve the excellence that we have to achieve to remain a viable healthcare provider is…the bar is much higher and so I think you’ll see more and more organizations trying to get through this because it’s such a radical change from the way many of us have done business for years. But we really…we have no choice from the standpoint it’s the right thing to do…and it really is.
We can sit and talk and argue about return on investments and we can make this a financial decision, but the bottom line is to take care of our patients the way we should, to deliver the excellent quality that we need to. It’s going to be driven by information technology…as the…as sort of the foundation that our expert physicians and nurses and other clinicians use to deliver the care that they have so for so many years delivered without the right kind of information support that really is required in this business.
[End of video transcript]
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