Last week I was doing a story on closed loop medadmin and found a 25-bed hospital doing CPOE, bedside bar coding and what looked to me like true closed loop. The hospital was part of Valley Health, a 6-hospital system that includes a 400-bed site. When CIO Joan Roscoe told me that her most advanced hospital was the 25-bed site, I muttered under my breath, “Well, you’re no Partners.” Joan heard me, burst out laughing and answered, “And I’m not John Glaser!”
I’ve been hearing a lot of that lately. Don’t get me wrong, our giant academic medical centers do groundbreaking work that the rest of us definitely need to watch. But we can’t all be InterMountain or the Mayo Clinic—or Partners, with the resources, the doctors and the academic affiliations. Those guys are brilliant--and unique. But there are many mid-size community hospitals out there, with no affiliation, all community physicians, and some very, very motivated leaders. And some of them are doing pretty amazing things. Yet they often don’t realize how advanced they are, IT-wise. I talk to them all the time, and hear “Yes, we’re doing that, and yes, we’re doing THAT.” And then I tell them how good they are.
Lately, those are the stories that I’m really interested in hearing. I know I’m still going to keep an eye on what John and Sue Schade are doing at Partners. We all should. But I also want to keep my eye on the barcoding/supply chain/logistics for meds that Mike McCurry at Sisters of Mercy in St. Louis is doing.and how Rick Schooler, CIO of Orlando Health, is drilling down into dashboards.
John, you can still call me, too.
