One-on-One with Greenwich Hospital CIO Jimmy Weeks

KG: Is that typical of your organization, to be an early adopter?

JW: It is. When we started this back in the late '80s and early '90s, we actually partnered with a company called JRS that was using our nurses to build a clinical documentation system. So we had bedside computers in our south wing back then. And then when our current CEO came on board, he saw that it was all best-of-breed. Pharmacy had its system, lab had its system. He was actually in a meeting where the vendors were arguing with each other and blaming each other for the fact that the interfaces weren't working. So he excused them, kept us in the room - at that time I was director of telecomm - and just said, ‘I'm done. We're a small, community hospital; we're not Columbia Presbyterian or Yale New Haven where we have huge needs. Go out and find something that does 80 percent of what we need. Find one system that has install-base in Connecticut, that has a good track record, and I'm done with this. All of these guys can go away.’

And in 1993, we signed a deal with Meditech. First, we implemented the financials and got off the mainframe - we were on iBacks at the time - and we then began to implement clinicals. So we began the trek down the road to clinical documentation online, and we migrated from JRS over to Meditech. It's been a good ride to where we are now, and now we're actually looking at whether we should upgrade to 6.0.

KG: So all in all, you've had a positive experience with Meditech?

JW: We have. The cost savings alone is big. I don't pay near what others are paying for their HIS systems. They're not exactly the greatest marketers, but we're getting a deliverable, affordable and integrated product. I've had many conversations with my peers at HIMSS about the horror shows they've gone through, and I don't have that.

KG: How has your involvement with HIMSS and CHIME benefited you as a CIO?

JW: It's a huge learning experience. I take advantage of the focus groups (at HIMSS) to hear stories of what people did that worked, what didn't work, how they recruit, things like that. Everything that you do in your daily job, you learn from those folks. Everything from what wire management did they use in their IDF closets to what are they doing for business continuity. I find that HIMSS could be a month long and it wouldn't be enough for me. The same goes for CHIME; they have great speakers sitting at the table with peers during lunch or the networking sessions. I always come away learning something.

KG: And I know you're big on social media, especially Twitter. How has that impacted your role?

JW: Well it's funny, but I wouldn't have gotten into Twitter if it wasn't for the little booth they had at HIMSS where they were showing people how to use it. And I only started that recently. That's pretty embarrassing; an early adopter of everything else and it took me that long to do social networking.

But what's amazing to me is the power it has. People are so passionate about bringing this forward for the betterment of safe and quality care, and not for the betterment of just buying more technology. It's exciting. Sometimes it's too consuming, because if you try to look at every single Tweet and follow the links, you'll be there forever. But it's just one more example of being able to share stories of what works and what doesn't. I think that's very powerful if people take advantage of it; they'll make fewer mistakes and just cut to the quick and do it the way that's most successful instead of trying things they're own way.

KG: I think at first, a lot of people dismissed it as another flash in the pan, but now we're seeing that it really has some legs.

JW: It does. And we've all had memberships on user lists, where people put out things like, ‘I'm looking for a new bar code printer for arm bands.’ You got responses on occasion, and that still will have a place, but with Twitter, it's just a broader audience where you can throw out anything from restaurant recommendations in Chicago to the best way to implement disaster recovery in a certain situation. If you put something out there, you'll get responses from peers, who'll say, ‘We did this and I'd never do it again,’ or ‘We did this and it worked out great.’ It's just one more resource. And with people having it on their iPhone and Blackberry, it's very timely and live. You don't have to wait a few days for an answer.

It's like the Internet. It's not all that long ago that we were invited by the Connecticut Hospital Association to be one of the first six hospitals in the state to connect to the Internet. And I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is cooler than the bulletin board I used to run.’ But it was still so non-graphical, so character-based, and you didn't know where it was going to go. And now, it's just amazing the information you can get out there and the resources that are available to you.