Medical Center Health System’s CIO, CEO Turn Massive EHR Project into Award Winner

SAN ANTONIO, Texas, Nov 1, 2017 – When the Medical Center Health System (MCHS) in Odessa, Texas, learned five years ago that the electronic health record (EHR) software it had been using for 25 years was being sunsetted, the leadership embraced it as an opportunity to bring about change. CEO William Webster and Gary Barnes, the system’s longstanding CIO, created a plan to implement a new EHR. What they and supportive staff throughout the system achieved was much more: a unified organization that puts the patient at the center.

In recognition of this achievement, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) today awarded Webster and Barnes the 2017 CHIME-AHA Transformational Leadership Award. Given annually in conjunction with the American Hospital Association (AHA), it honors a CEO and CIO who recognize the benefits of a strong partnership that uses IT to significantly change the delivery of healthcare.

Key to MCHS’ success was a decision to unify its analytics team and data governance structure, which allowed MCHS to consolidate and standardize multiple data sources. They also created two distinct but complementary chief medical information officer (CMIO) positions, with one for inpatient settings and one for outpatient care.

“As cost and quality are increasingly measured not by care episodes but by overall patient outcomes, optimizing transitions in care has become a focal point for health systems,” Barnes said. “Bringing together the expertise of both inpatient and outpatient domains ensures that the insights garnered from analytics fully address the continuum of care.”

The EHR plan included regional partners and the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Medical Center in Odessa. “We knew it would be an opportunity to not only improve our relationship with our regional partners but it would advance care and efficiency for our patients, physicians and employees,” Webster said. “Although it was a very large and complex project, MCHS was able to stay on task, focused and resilient in order to meet the go-live deadline date given to us.”

They not only met their go-live date but they also remained under budget. Clinician adoption and usage has been strong, and thanks to a voice recognition mobile device application, they have experienced improvements in turnaround time for reports at reduced costs.

To learn more about the CHIME-AHA Transformational Leadership Award, go here.  

About CHIME

The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) is an executive organization dedicated to serving chief information officers (CIOs) and other senior healthcare IT leaders. With more than 2,400 CIO members and over 150 healthcare IT vendors and professional services firms, CHIME provides a highly interactive, trusted environment enabling senior professional and industry leaders to collaborate; exchange best practices; address professional development needs; and advocate the effective use of information management to improve the health and healthcare in the communities they serve. For more information, please visit chimecentral.org.

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