Brookdale Senior Living is the largest long-term care provider in the U.S, with 660 locations and the capacity for nearly 70,000 senior Americans. Brookdale covers independent living, assisted living and memory care and is the nation’s provider for free-standing memory care for dementia customers.
HCITS: What are your IT initiatives for 2012? What projects are you working on?
Ranson: The long-term care industry is a little bit behind the technology curve of acute-care hospitals and doctors offices; however, we are innovating a large enterprise wireless deployment next year with 52 million square feet of communities to cover in wireless next year so, we have a very large initiative on that. We are also working on our electronic medical record platform for long-term care. For hospitals, organizations like Cerner and Epic have been staples in that industry and there is no Epic or Cerner in long-term care, so we are implementing a best-of-breed solution to come up with our electronic healthcare record applications inside Brookdale for interoperability as denoted in the Obamacare announcement a couple years ago.
In this pretty tough economy we aren’t doing as many projects as we would like, but we are going to be doing a risk assessment on the technical side of IT and will be doing some security audits and analysis around our security. It has been said that people over 70 years of age are one of the largest growing segments for use of the Internet. So, we are also working on a very progressive program where we are rolling out Internet Cafe´s into our communities and are staffing it with training folks to help seniors get on the Internet and do things like Skype, Facebook and work with internal applications inside the community. We have a big initiative on helping seniors get on the Internet to connect with their kids and grandkids—we have heard some really inspiring stories about grandmas who are texting with their grandkids in high school so it’s really great.
HCITS: As a CIO for a healthcare provider, what issues do you face?
Ranson: One of the things that we face in our industry is the data access vs. privacy—if you lock everything down you might inhibit the business from getting done so there has to be a fine balance between data access and privacy. That certainly is a challenge that we look at every day.
As I mentioned earlier, our strategic projects such as our electronic medical/healthcare records and interoperability pose a big challenge for us because in the stimulus package there was a lot of money for acute-care hospitals and doctors offices while the long-term care industry got virtually zero money. If you look at the people over the age of 70, they spend more time with us than they do at the hospital (they may spend four days at the hospital but stay 20 years with us), so we are challenged to make sure that long-term care is plugged in to the continuing healthcare of our senior Americans, but yet we haven’t gotten the same amount of money to do the same thing that the hospitals and doctors offices are asked to do.
HCITS: Do you have a good relationship with your organization’s business leaders (CEO, CFO, CMO etc.)?
Ranson: I would say absolutely yes—each one of those titles are members of my IT steering committee and we meet on an every-two-week basis, more often if needed to. There are six senior management individuals who comprise my IT steering committee and they drive the direction of the projects that IT works on. Any conflicts or “are we doing the right thing?” questions are always brought up in that group. I chair the IT steering committee, but those folks certainly have a huge interest in making sure the needs of the business are met by IT and they drive our decisions.
HCITS: What are you doing to improve that relationship?
Ranson: To make sure that IT is aligned with the business we have two other programs such as business process owner meetings with the VPs in the various departments and they meet with an IT management person—my person in charge of IT finance meets with the controller or VP of Accounts Payable, etc. They meet on an every-two-week basis so they make sure that the items that come out of the IT-steering committee have been driven down to a lower level and are executed on. Every business management person in the organization has someone on the IT staff that they are paired up with.
Likewise, the top 15 executives in the company are paired with a director, I call this the “IT buddy system,” and the VP or CIO in IT and we attend their staff meetings to make sure that we are listening to how the business is being run and we give that executive an avenue into IT. A lot of times they don’t understand IT and are afraid to ask the question, but if they have a good relationship with their IT buddy or executive sponsor, they develop this relationship and are comfortable calling them up and asking those necessary questions. That program has paid big dividends. I’ve done this for years and in a lot of conversations with other CIOs I’ve mentioned this program and it has paid big dividends for them as well once implemented in their organization.
HCITS: What are you doing in the area of BI?
Ranson: In the coming year, we are probably not focusing as much on BI as we have in the last two years. In the last two years we have significantly invested in the area of business intelligence by building our first data warehouse, implementing the now 20 terabytes of data in our BI data warehouse—next year is going to be spent expanding the use of that data. We have built it and some have come to use it; not as many are using it as effectively as they should. So, we are going to focus on reintroducing and re-educating our business leaders on the vast amount of data and knowledge that they have inside of our BI program. It is going to be more of a training year in our BI area as opposed to a building year.
HCITS: If you haven’t done so already, are you implementing a mobility plan?
Ranson: The answer to that is absolutely yes- the EMRs and the electronic healthcare program that I talked about today is intended to be deployed on mobile devices, specifically Androids, and we will probably be deploying 2,000-3,000 of those this coming year. We have a very detailed mobility policy, and it will encompass all of those devices as well as the 5,000 other mobile devices that we have such as BlackBerrys, smartphones and iPads today and we are, in a nutshell, giving all of our people eligibility for their choice of an iPhone, BlackBerry or an Android-based phone.
And, if they don’t want to use a company-provided device, we do allow bring your own device to work and we can connect and secure it, but there are some releases that they need to sign that says we are able to wipe the device if it is lost or stolen. We’ve already dipped our toes into the “bring-your own” program, and it has been a very popular program for us because some of our people don’t want to have both a work and a personal device, but instead allow those to melt together.
HCITS: Do you have a cloud-based infrastructure in place?
Ranson: Today we do not outsource much, although with our EMR and our electronic healthcare programs, two of the three best-of-breed solutions that we’ve chosen are software as a service. In 2012, we will be utilizing some applications in the cloud. We are working really hard to make sure we have all of the contracts and security correct as we roll out our solutions in 2012.
HCITS: What advice can you give other healthcare CIOs to improve their IT strategy?
Ranson: I would say to never lose sight of the business and business plans. You never want to hear that the company can’t do something because IT can’t move fast enough. And, I think that is a key differentiator for us in that we do have the CEO, CFO, CMO, COO and several other business executives involved in all of the IT decisions and help drive the projects that we do. We always want to be ahead of them trying to anticipate what we need to be flexible on in order to change so that the business can move forward.
HCITS: How is your role as a CIO transforming/changing?
Ranson: I mentioned earlier that long-term care is behind the technology curve—being the CIO for the largest provider for senior housing in the US, we are constantly on the bleeding or cutting edge of what we are trying to do. There are a lot of pieces of software out there for the long-term care industry that support 10, 15, 20, 50 maybe 100 or 200 communities, but nobody out there supports 660 communities like we do with some of our applications. So, we had to write a tremendous amount of the applications that Brookdale uses simply because the software is not available in the long-term industry. We can’t buy off-the-shelf software that was meant for a hospital or a doctor’s office and make it work in long-term care. From an IT perspective inside Brookdale, our role is very different than the IT role in other long-term care industries because we have 12,000 people logging onto our networks vs. their maybe 6,000 people. The scalability that we have had to figure with little help from the government or outside company has been very difficult.
No comments:
Post a Comment