A few weeks ago, Russ Branzell gave industry leaders at the AHIMA convention something to cheer about when he said he was “mad as hell” — about the rapid pace of change in the industry and the toll it’s taking on hospitals and health systems. Branzell wanted to get people talking, and it worked. But he believes it’s going to take much more. In fact, the CHIME CEO believes it’s going to take “revolutionary action” by those who are willing to stick out their necks to create the transformation needed to improve patient care. In this interview, he discusses his thoughts on the Meaningful Use final rule, why it’s time to redefine success, the prioritization challenges facing CIOs, and what’s in store at the upcoming CHIME Fall Forum.
Chapter 2
- Creating “a partnership and facilitation mindset”
- New org to provide training, networking & advocacy for CSOs
- “CIOs are getting even more concerned.”
- Plans to expand LEAD
- 2014 Fall Forum
- Best practice sharing — “Everyone is looking for the silver bullet.”
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Bold Statements
If they’re working on revenue cycle, the owner of this initiative better be someone within finance. If we’re going to work on physician workflow, we’d better have physicians driving this change in culture transformation
We’re seeing this now as an area that is concerning boards within organizations greatly, which in turn means CIOs are getting even more concerned about this.
If one of their concerns is working in cloud-based solutions and they see a CIO who has very much done this successfully, they now have the ability to share and get that information in a quick way to replicate this out.
It’s not necessarily about having to create it, but to get it from someone else and then tailor it just a little bit for our organization and rapidly deploy these best practices without having to create everything at home.
Gamble: Those who seem to have some success with it tend to have a system set up where the clinicians have enough input so that they don’t feel like the change is being forced on them, but sometimes that’s a tough model to replicate.
Branzell: Where I see people — and in particular CIOs — being very successful is when they have a partnership and facilitation mindset. That is, if they’re working on revenue cycle, the owner of this initiative in the outcomes and the process change better be someone within finance. If we’re going to work on physician workflow, we’d better have physicians driving this change in culture transformation that needs to occur. Those who really understand the relational issues and understand that they’re just part of a process of the rest changing seem to be very successful. When you hear the old term ‘it was just an IT project,’ usually it equates to it failed.
Gamble: Right, that scapegoat mentality.
Branzell: Exactly.
Gamble: One of the many new things from CHIME is the organization for CSOs and obviously this is a position that’s starting to get a little bit more attention. I wanted to talk about that organization and what you hope to accomplish with that.
Branzell: We had a very successful early launch on this. It actually far exceeded our goals or even thoughts of what would occur. As we launched this, we put the same parameters as the original days of CHIME where if we thought we could get to about 100 members by the end of the year. We’re just around two months into this new organization and we are now over 200 new members in this organization and growing every single day and week. I think that’s a testament to the need that we heard from not only our current members, which were CIOs, and their concerns about security, because a vast majority of them have security reporting to them, but also those CIOs who, because of the size or the complexity of their organization, were the CSOs. There was literally no service out there for them to collaborate professionally at the executive level, to receive the training they needed to, and then most importantly, be the advocates for them in the industry.
So we’ve been very successful with the leadership of our internal team with George McCulloch, and then externally with some great partners, both vendor and CSOs, that have come on very quickly to try to drive this to be what the members need first and foremost, which is what an association is, but also what the industry needs. We’re seeing some very early success with this and will be surprised if we’re not at 250 or 300 members by the end of the year.
Gamble: It seems like there really was a need that wasn’t being met, especially since security is really in the spotlight these days.
Branzell: Yeah, just last weekend, the number one headline on the USA Today Weekend edition was hacks across the nation. We’re seeing this now as an area that is concerning boards within organizations greatly, which in turn means CIOs are getting even more concerned about this. One statistic we heard just this week at our regional lead events — we’ve done two of those now for security ajd we have another one coming up in December — is that though this is a huge priority really from an organizational perspective, probably only half the organizations in the country that should have one, have a fulltime Chief Security Officer. So we’re trying to help educate and many are trying to hire — and they don’t exist, they come from other industries, so they don’t understand healthcare as well as they should. So we think there’s a big role that we have as an association to try to help all along in this journey and educate the industry on what we need to do to provide appropriate security for everybody.
Gamble: Right, and that’s something that benefits CIOs too because it’s the old adage you hear about what keeps you up at night, and security is always way up there. It’s about avoiding the nightmare of the headlines and everything that happens when a breach hits an organization.
Branzell: It’s just like the maturity process that occurred for CIOs; 20 years ago the term CIO was kind of scattered. Now it’s fairly ubiquitous; everybody knows what a healthcare CIO is, for the most part. The same is true though now for this next level of executive leadership under the CIO, which in many cases weren’t at the executive level. Many are now, including Chief Technology Officers, Chief Security Officers, Chief Application Officers, which is why we launched those three new organizations or announced them last year. We’ve already done Chief Security Officers right on our timeline and we’re probably within weeks of announcing and formalizing the beginning, just as we did with CSOs, the CTOs and the CAOs.
Gamble: You just mentioned the LEAD events — are they focusing on different topics? It seems at least a couple of them have focused on security, but what’s the vision with those going forward?
Branzell: The three for this year were all regional events on cyber security and security framework in policy. Next year as we look into this we’ll diversify that. We’re trying to decide right now, through our final process of not only our budgeting but strategic planning process here, how many we’ll do next year. It’ll probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of six to nine with multiple different events, and a lot of it will have to do with the new associations that we’re launching. But obviously we’ll want to have some targeted toward the audience of CIOs, as well as the other membership groups of CSOs, CTOs, and CAOs.
Gamble: Right. I’m sure that there’s no shortage of topics you could cover with those.
Branzell: What we want to do is make sure we’re meeting our members’ needs, and so we try to do some surveying, and we try to get input from all the different constituents and find out what’s most important. It was very obvious that cyber security was one this year that truly has the ears of so many, which is why we have folks at our Fall Forum that will be speaking on this, as well as the need to do regional events so that those who can’t get to our larger events actually have an opportunity for some education.
Gamble: So that’s a nice little segue into the Fall Forum. Let’s talk a little bit about what CIOs can expect with this conference coming up in San Antonio.
Branzell: We’re really excited about this event that we have coming up, our annual event in San Antonio, at a wonderful location that allows us the size and the scale we need to bring so many people together. As always, I think our foremost need is to make sure we’re doing networking and education for our members to bring them together to share with each other, and to provide them some annual training they need to be successful moving forward.
Some different spins this year though that we’re doing is one is best practice sharing. In collaboration with our foundation vendor firms, right now we have about 35 organization CIOs with a vendor partner that will be presenting best practices via whitepapers across a pretty broad spectrum of different types of initiatives. One of our goals is to, as much as possible, enable best practice sharing. If somebody has a problem with X and they happen to see a table with one of these white papers, they know who to contact, both vendor and/or CIO, and they immediately have a peer to be able to connect with and work on this. So if one of their concerns is working in cloud based solutions and they see a CIO who has very much done this successfully, they now have the ability to share and get that information in a quick way to replicate this out. That’s one of the things we want to try as much as possible, to get that out as quickly as we can.
We will be making some announcements. A little bit of a tease for you; just as we announced new initiatives last year, we have new initiatives we’ll be launching in 2015, and we will be announcing some of those from the stage during the event. So there’ll be some new stuff rolling out. As we created this theme and this energy that we’re trying to create about creating revolution in the industry — not just an evolution — we’re going to be continuing on that theme with some stuff that’s pretty changing in the industry to try to help everybody move at a faster pace but at an easier pace as well.
Gamble: Although I’m sure that a good amount of attendees want a little bit of everything, do you find there are people who go with a specific goal that they really want to learn about, like for instance, cloud-based solutions?
Branzell: Right. Our track sessions very much are focused on different topics, and so we have very specific sessions led by CIOs or others that are trying to share the ways they’ve done this. That’s one of the reasons we’ve extend this also to a white paper sharing, so people can just pick up information and look. I think everyone is looking for an extra silver bullet out there. As they move through this process, they want to look for as many ways to ease the burden on their own organizations and we think this event will be a great way to do that.
Gamble: One thing that I found pretty interesting is that even if there isn’t a formal subgroup, that there are organizations that have something in common that can use an opportunity like CHIME to share best practices, whether it’s children’s hospitals or critical access hospitals, and that’s an interesting dynamic.
Branzell: Right, so if somebody is struggling with whatever their topic is — everybody struggles with something and is having challenges with something. That’s one of the reasons to come together and to share as much as possible. As I jokingly referred to the other day, if you can just walk out with a one million dollar idea, what have you saved your organization in time and complexity? Being able to steal that blatantly from someone else and put in to your organization in a much easier way, that’s one of the things that my previous organization did very, very well on its journey to the Baldrige Award, which was to find the best practice out there. It’s not necessarily about having to create it, but to get it from someone else and then tailor it just a little bit for our organization and rapidly deploy these best practices without having to create everything at home.
Gamble: Right. There’s not always a need to reinvent the wheel. There are a lot of great ideas out there.
Branzell: Exactly.
Gamble: For those of us in the New York area, are they going to be okay with us in Texas? There’s enough hospitality down there?
Branzell: We will treat you wonderfully in Texas, as long as you have your passport up-to-date and your immunizations. You are coming to a different country. As a person who was actually raised about eight miles from where we’re holding this event — purely a coincidence, by the way — I can tell you Texas is its own other country. It’ll be a wonderful event, and I think everyone will truly enjoy their time there and also get a lot out of it.
Gamble: Okay, so I know we’ve covered a lot. I don’t know if there was anything else you wanted to add, but it sounds like that CHIME is doing a lot and will continue to be picking up steam in the next couple of months.
Branzell: I think this is a downhill effort, and that is once you start getting the momentum it just continues to pick up steam and continues to pick up the correct track. And so I think we’re very fortunate that we have a membership that’s truly engaged, but we also have an industry that needs the right leaders in the right places more than ever. We’re very fortunate to have that. And that includes you all, and the work you’re doing in getting the messages out there for folks. But I think the more we come together as a collective — and that’s all the different associations, including the folks in DC and our vendor partners — we have the opportunity to make a real difference at a time that’s truly needed.
Gamble: Absolutely. Thank you, as always, for your time and I look forward to seeing you and catching up in San Antonio.
Branzell: Absolutely. Thank you so much for all you do.
Gamble: Thank you, Russ.
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