What would you do if your company made so many acquisitions that it doubled in size? That's the challenge facing Joy M. Grosser, vice president and CIO of UnityPoint Health, an integrated health system located throughout Iowa, Western Illinois, and Southern Wisconsin. UnityPoint Health comprises not just hospitals and clinics, but also a health plan, Grosser says. In this interview she tells The Enterprisers Project how she manages integration for these disparate systems.
The Enterprisers Project (TEP): What are some of the challenges of integrating a system that is grown through acquisition?
Grosser: One of the things we're trying to figure out is how do we bring best practices together. How do we integrate people from a logistical perspective, let alone a business perspective? We may have one region working on a provider solution to communicate better with patients, or bringing video to bear so we can see patients online. Another might be working on best practices when on boarding a patient.
TEP: So how do you integrate all those different functions?
Grosser: Any time we have the opportunity, whether with an existing facility or a growth partner, we come together with the business side to identify what we're trying to accomplish. It's not just change for change sake. We don't come in as IT and say, "We're here to change your system." We talk to them about what we're trying to accomplish by doing this and how it connects with the strategies of the organization and its business workflows. And we look at where they have the opportunity to grow into something they didn't have previously.
We value human nature as well as healthcare leadership. We talk a lot about propositions of value on investment. What will be the expectations for added value versus, "I saved an extra dollar by doing this."
TEP: What sorts of value propositions are you looking at?
Grosser: There are really several reasons why you might make a change to a system. First and foremost is a financial proposition. If I have to support two EHRs [electronic health record systems] instead of one, that's not a good use of our resources.
And sometimes we make changes because they benefit everyone. Working across nine different regions, if I find one of my regions has a phenomenal rate of avoiding sepsis, the reason may be some alert they put into the system that has the triage function do a particular test or check a blood level at a certain point. Beneficial business practices like these are more easily adopted across a region if we put them into a standard protocol. So other regions become beneficiaries as well.
TEP: Have you encountered any resistance to change?
Grosser: There are technology challenges that are easily solved, but people get tied to their emails, for example. They're moving to a shared data center so they're saving money by not having their own data center. But they're used to an IT department within the walls of their organization, and now the people supporting them may no longer be within their region. And the people who do live within their region may be supporting something elsewhere as well. There's change management needed to help people be comfortable with working across multiple regions as opposed to just their own.
Then there are new tools for most clinicians, and as they're adopting a tool there are always 10 more waiting in the wings. They always have patients coming in and saying, "Can I use this app? How can you help me understand more about my disease?"
We want to make sure we're cognizant about how people learn and how they accept technology. We can't expect our clinicians to become technical advisors, so it's important we have the tools available in communities as people are ready to accept them.
As CIOs, we're kind of at that place right now. We've spent a lot of time implementing tools and the opportunity we have now is, how do we work with our clinicians to find solutions to bigger problems and find bigger opportunities to engage with our patients and help keep them healthier and out of our system? And how do we continue to evolve now that we've got those tools in place?
You're seeing lots of hospitals and home care providers come up with great solutions. The more we can know about those solutions, the better it is for our clinicians — and our patients.
Joy Grosser became Vice President, Chief Information Officer in 2009. Prior to joining UnityPoint Health, she served as CIO for the University of California Irvine Health Sciences System. She also worked for Loyola Health System in Maywood, Illinois, and Health Midwest in Kansas City, Missouri, and Research Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri. She holds a bachelor's degree in Political Science and Health Economics from Stanford University, Stanford, California, and a master's in Health Administration from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Grosser is a member of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, the Health Information Management Systems Society and the American College of Healthcare Executives.
