Providers’ Perceptions: a Conversation with WellStar CIO Ron Strachan

Jennifer Dennard, Social Marketing Director
January 5, 2011


Delivering world-class healthcare is no easy feat, and yet WellStar - Georgia's largest not-for-profit health system - has made this its mission. Integrating more than 11,500 employees, including 400 physicians and advanced practitioners, into five hospitals and more than 100 physician practices and other healthcare facilities to provide patients the highest level of care possible is a daily directive. Add in behind-the-scenes challenges related to healthcare IT, and the mission becomes, while not impossible, certainly challenging.

Ron Strachan, Senior Vice President and CIO at WellStar, faced these challenges, and a number of others, when he first stepped into his role a little over three years ago. Time, patience and a keen sense of putting the right people and solutions in the right place at the right time helped Strachan to enable WellStar to achieve its mission and realize its vision: to deliver world-class healthcare.


Initial Challenges
"Three years ago when I arrived, we had very critical, fundamental issues," Strachan says. A lack of system downtime structure was an initial concern. "We had people taking systems down during the week, every week, during the day, didn't matter what time of day," he explains. "So that was a pretty good indicator that there were a lot of fundamental things that you would see in an IT program that just did not exist here. So we've spent the last three years shoring up processes - from running an IT shop to simultaneously implementing advanced clinical systems."

Shoring up WellStar's data systems also presented a challenge. "We've had massive data center failures that, knock on wood, we've gotten past," he says. "In the time I've been here, we've had three multi-day failures due to a lack of investment into our infrastructure to keep things running, to keep the lights on properly. We're moving past that, so now we're at a point where we're ready to transition to the next part of our recovery - going to a brand new data center hopefully within the next 12 months, and then going to a replicated environment so that we'll measure our downtime in minutes per year instead of hours per year." Moving forward with things like computerized physician order entry (CPOE), health information exchange (HIE) and advanced states of electronic medical record (EMR) implementation are also on Strachan's to-do list.

Meeting Meaningful Use
Strachan is confident that WellStar will qualify for Meaningful Use on time, but doesn't lose sleep over it. "For us as an integrated delivery system, most of what we're doing to qualify for Meaningful Use we were doing anyway," he says. "It was probably the biggest coincidental project ever. We were already committed to CPOE. We knew that we had to do major upgrades to our McKesson clinical infrastructure. We were already implementing EMR in the outpatient setting. We could spell HIE before the government even knew what it was. We were already going down the path of a more robust business intelligence tool that would allow us to have better quality reporting.

"The only thing that was a surprise, and it was a surprise by virtue of the timing, is the need for patient access to their own record," he explains. That has accelerated our plans for a patient portal, and has forced us to look for an organization that can actually provide an aggregated patient portal that accurately combines our McKesson information with our NextGen information with our cardiology .... There are very few companies that can do that.

"Fortunately," he adds, " our HIE vendor has developed a patient portal. What's good about that for us is that we've already got that connectivity done for the HIE, so now we're just going to pull patient-specific information and aggregate it into the portal for patient use."

Committing to HIE and Accountable Care
WellStar is fully committed to HIE, and is looking to initiate operation of its private HIE in the very near future. Strachan explains that not only will it give the health system a better view between its McKesson, NextGen and cardiology systems, but will allow WellStar to more easily integrate with the IT systems of any practices acquired in the future.

Though Strachan says WellStar is "all in" on ACOs, having partnered with healthcare alliance Premier Inc., he admits that his team is still figuring out the technical infrastructure that will be needed. "We suspect that our NextGen EMR will contribute to that quite a bit," he says. "But we also suspect that we're going to have to have an expanded business intelligence layer to help us with that as well - to not just retrospectively watch trends, but to proactively see where we can manage care better for individuals, since we'll then be responsible for end-to-end care for these particular patients.

It All Comes Back to Quality
WellStar's embrace of new healthcare IT solutions and patient-care concepts will serve it well in its mission to deliver world-class healthcare, a large part of which includes achieving high quality ratings. Strachan is of course aware of third-party ratings from organizations like HealthGrades, but places more importance on metrics developed internally - patient satisfaction and readmittance being of great import - and how those metrics compare to other organizations across the country.

"It's very competitive, and as time goes on, people are going to have much more of a say in where they receive their healthcare, because it's going to be more out-of-pocket," he says. "We're anticipating that and taking steps now that will serve us bettering the future when it comes to discretionary healthcare spending."

Exciting Times
Strachan doesn't give the impression that WellStar will slow down in its quest to deliver the best patient care possible; if anything, he believes the healthcare industry is just ramping up. "It's great if you're in the industry," he explains. "I remind my staff when we have our quarterly meetings how lucky we are that we picked healthcare as a vertical and then IT as our core skill set. Look what's going on in the industry ... it's pretty exciting."

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For more pictures from Billian's HealthDATA's recent trip to WellStar's offices, visit our Facebook page.



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