TEXT/PODCAST: One-on-One-w/Meditech President & COO Howard Messing, Part III

In every industry, there are organizations so pervasive they constitute bellwethers for the entire market segment. In healthcare IT, that company is Meditech. With over 2,200 customers and almost $400 million in software revenues last year, the Westwood, Mass.-based organization’s opinions on national policy — especially the HITECH Act’s Meaningful Use NPRM — should be taken very seriously by D.C.’s policy wonks. Offering those opinions to healthsystemCIO.com editor Anthony Guerra this exclusive interview is President and COO Howard Messing. In the following discussion, Messing — who was recently promoted to CEO subject to a perfunctory confirmation vote — offers his thoughts on the aforementioned HITECH Act, meeting customer demands for the latest software and much more.

(Part I, Part II)

BOLD STATEMENTS

I hear people, frankly, who know that the business is picking up worrying about what the quality will be. They know we’re hiring a lot of people, and they inquire very carefully about who we’re hiring and where we’re getting them from.

I certainly find that if I call the CEO of a particular hospital and if the CEO has the CIO return the call, I know there’s something not quite right because it’s saying that the CEO is not interested in the relationship.

I don’t think anything needs to be overwhelming if it’s done in a controlled fashion and everybody is brought on board.

PODCAST: [audio:One-on-One-W-Howard-Messing-Chapter-3]

GUERRA: Do you look at the KLAS reports to see your scores?

MESSING: I don’t look at them. We have people who do; I don’t personally look at those reports.

GUERRA: Do you have internal processes for getting customer feedback?

MESSING: Yes, we certainly get a lot of feedback from customers. Our customer services division does all kinds of surveys and random calls. I tend to look at some of the reports that are prepared there. So we do very carefully track what our customers are saying to us about our software.

Our former CFO many years ago gave me some advice when I once went to him and was talking about our competitors. He said to me, “Howard, don’t worry about the competitors. Keep your head down and do the best possible job you can. Everything else will take care of itself.”  So I don’t worry too much about comparisons to competitors or third-party reports, be those KLAS or Gartner or whoever. I just want us to do the best possible job we can for our customers.

GUERRA: I suppose if you’re always watching your competitors, you wind up imitating instead of leading. Does that make sense?

MESSING: Yes, that does make sense.

GUERRA: So you’re getting some feedback internally. Is there anything you specifically hear your customers asking for?

MESSING: I do hear a lot of people recognizing how vital the software’s becoming to their operation and, much as I said before, encouraging us to pull out the stops on patient safety. I don’t think there are any particular problems in that area, but you really can’t do too much, and that’s the number one focus for me personally moving forward.

I hear people, frankly, who know that the business is picking up worrying about what the quality will be. They know we’re hiring a lot of people, and they inquire very carefully about who we’re hiring and where we’re getting them from. They’re quite worried about the “green persons” syndrome that companies tend to run into when they hire a lot of people in a short time.

So I’m not seeing complaints, but I’m seeing fears about those things in the reports that we get. And then the last thing, which maybe just goes with the territory these days, is people just worrying about the complexity they have to manage in order to have a modern healthcare information system. You know, particularly from some of our larger places, they have multiple sites with multiple systems and lots of hardware distributed all over the place, so managing that can be difficult. So we continue to hear people asking us to make sure that we do things to make that easier for them.

GUERRA: I’d like to talk a little bit about the culture of the company. It’s a fascinating company in a fascinating industry. You can count the major core clinical HIT vendors on one hand — one and a half hands really — and they’re all very interesting companies. Meditech has a very distinct culture. You’ve been there since ’74, is that correct?

MESSING: Yes, since I was 10 years old (laughing).

GUERRA: Neil started the company in 1968. Larry Polimeno came on the first week in 1969.

MESSING: You know your history.

GUERRA: Well, you have a great site. It’s clear this company is your life. It’s not just a place you worked, and I mean that in the best way. I think to be able to marry your life and your work in a healthy way is probably one of the greatest joys you can have.

MESSING: First of all, that’s my favorite subject (laughing), and I agree with you. It is my life’s work, and it is a joy to be able to work at a place that you feel passionately about. One of the things that makes it even better is it’s not just Neil and Larry and myself. There’s a lot of people who have made this their home. This is their life’s work too, and we’re confident that it will stay their life’s work. That makes for a very wonderful work environment — one where we can really work together to achieve a common goal. I know that we’re really supporting each other because nobody’s going anywhere, and that has been really a big part of the pleasure about being here and watching it grow. That’s also why it’s so important we bring new people in and get them to feel the same way. That’s a challenge, but it’s one that we work hard to achieve.

It is a special place, and we’re hoping to keep it a special place for the indefinite future, along with our special culture. We spent a lot of time thinking about and promoting that culture and making sure it’s not just a culture that worked in the past, but one that will continue to work into the future.

So we do consider very carefully issues of succession and making sure that our culture is experienced by people in a positive way, and we think it works. We’re quite aware that it’s very different from most of the companies not only in our industry but in all industries. The promotion from within being strictly observed here is something that is a very rare thing in any hi-tech company, and it’s something that I think promotes our culture and continues to make sure that as we grow and as we age, we keep it the same way it was when it was a much smaller company.

GUERRA: Is there an overall way to describe the culture? How do you create a place where people want to stay? There are always issues of pay, but usually that’s not the deciding factor, rather it’s people feeling valued and appreciated and rewarded and all these types of things. Do you just make sure managers understand that these are the important things to focus on?

MESSING: I think there’s some of that. You probably would have to hire a psychologist from the outside to come and give you a real answer to this question, because it’s hard for me to actually say, but we really want to make sure that all of the managers are respectful of people, that we respect the fact people have issues that go beyond work. Whereas you want to be professional on how you deal with that, you also want to recognize that if they’re going to be here a long time, and it’s going to be their life’s work — as it is for many of us — that we create an environment where they’re respected.

We put a lot of emphasis on supervisors and managers and directors and all of the staff really trying to care for, and take care of, their people. We don’t have the same syndrome that a lot of companies have where human resources handles certain problems that the manager doesn’t handle, because we want the manager to be responsible for all problems. They may need an assist from somebody else, but we don’t say, “Oh, go take that to human resources.”

GUERRA: Since you’re bringing on 300 people this year, how do you get people that fit the Meditech culture? Everybody makes a few bad hires, but how do you ensure most are successful? Do you have a specific hiring methodology?

MESSING: Well, I’ll be honest, we do. We do think we have a good interview process, but what you said is absolutely true, particularly when you hire a fair number of young people. Many of them who are coming out of college or coming after their first or second job still aren’t really sure what they want to do in the long run. You are going to hire some people who, while they may be good people, don’t work out for whatever reason. So we do focus on hiring good people and trying to keep them. We do expect that some of them will leave at the 18-month, 2-year, 3-year mark.

Our goal is to continually educate them about how important the long term is, and we put a lot of emphasis on making sure that they’re in tune with that. We really try, during the interview process, and during the first year or two, to make sure that there’s a good fit between our culture and the individuals involved.

So there’s a lot of benefits we have at the two or three-year mark that aren’t necessarily there early on. For example, we have a lot of telecommuting, and we have some part-time work available, but we do not let new people do that. We want them exposed to the culture on a daily basis until we’re confident that they understand us and that we understand them. Then we gradually phase in those kinds of things because, again, those are the kinds of things that work for people with different lifestyles.

GUERRA: So that’s a trust that you have build up and earn?

MESSING: That’s the word that’s used a lot here.

GUERRA: I’m pretty sure you know John Haffty. I interviewed John a month or two ago and we talked a lot about Meditech, obviously. One of the interesting things he said was that the more a customer invests in the relationship with Meditech, the more fruitful the relationship will be. Does that make sense to you?

MESSING: Yes, it does make sense. I don’t understand why that would be different for almost any company, other than the fact that since our staff here tends to be long-lived those relationships can last a long time. I certainly find that if I call the CEO of a particular hospital and if the CEO has the CIO return the call, I know there’s something not quite right because it’s saying that the CEO is not interested in the relationship. So if the CEO or the CIO or if those senior people really want to form long-term relationships, obviously that works well in terms of us getting to understand what their needs are and letting us communicate to them what we’re all about.

So we do encourage all customers to stay in close contact. We provide a number of vehicles for them to meet with us, either here or at their site and, to be perfectly honest, the customers that do the best are the ones who avail themselves of those opportunities. But again, I’m surprised that wouldn’t be true for any company.

GUERRA: You touched on succession planning, are there any more specific you can give in that area?

MESSING: Well, again, it is something that we spend a lot of time on. As you might know, I just assumed the CEO title.

GUERRA: I did hear that. Congratulations.

MESSING: Thank you. Although technically, we have to wait for a special shareholders’ meeting for me to actually assume that title, which will be in the next few weeks. And that’s, again, a sign of our succession planning. Our intention, when we are able to do it, is always to promote an officer into a senior officer position, and then we’ll promote someone to the position that person held. So, for example, we have Bob Gale who was our Vice President of Development for a long time, he’s now our Senior Vice President of Development. We then promoted Michelle O’Connor to be the Vice President of Development. Bob still sticks around and continues to work with her. He does special projects, and it’s a way of easing her into that job and getting her to really grow into that position.

You’ll see things like that in other areas from us moving forward. We have a lot of very good people at the level below officers who hopefully can grow into leaders for the future. I can’t tell you this particular person is going to be promoted on this particular date, but there’s certainly lots of good people who that can happen to.

GUERRA: What is Neil’s current involvement, and what’s your relationship with him?

MESSING: I’ve worked for Neil for 36 years. I think that we have a pretty close working relationship. By the way, Larry Polimeno, our Vice Chairman, also stays involved, and I have a good working relationship with him. Neil is here at the office almost every day. He has a workstation out in the middle of an area where our advanced programmers work. He spends his day, some of it, on programming ideas, but regarding day-to-day operations, he tends not to be involved at all. He tends to leave that to me. I see him several times a week. Most of the time, we have a short discussion about what’s going on with the business, and it’s a very good, positive relationship. He’s a special guy, and I’ve enjoyed working for him and love the arrangement that we have today and hope that will continue for the indefinite future.

GUERRA: As a final question, what message would you like to give your hospital CIO customers, some of whom are worried about meeting the Meaningful Use deadlines?

MESSING: I think my biggest message to them is to make sure they communicate with me what’s going on. The thing that bothers me the most is when I have a customer who tells me that something happened in the past that they were disappointed with but Meditech wasn’t aware of it. And particularly, in this stressful period, CIOs really should get a hold of us, and they can call me individually, or they can call the other representatives we have here, and let us know and let us be part of the concern. We can then work it out with them. I don’t think anything needs to be overwhelming if it’s done in a controlled fashion and everybody is brought on board.

Related posts:

1. TEXT/PODCAST: One-on-One-w/Meditech President & COO Howard Messing, Part I
2. TEXT/PODCAST: One-on-One-w/Meditech President & COO Howard Messing, Part II
3. TEXT/PODCAST: One-on-One w/Former ONC Senior Adviser John Glaser, Part III
4. TEXT/PODCAST: One-on-One w/Former ONC Senior Adviser John Glaser, Part II
5. TEXT/PODCAST: One-on-One w/Former ONC Senior Adviser John Glaser, Part I