With any major decision, having the right representation is critical – even when the decision seems like an obvious one, said Rich Rogers, CIO at Prisma Health, in this interview. “You have to make sure you have a number of folks represented who voice that same opinion.”

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Gamble:  Hi Rich, thanks so much for joining us. I look forward to talking about the work you guys are doing — obviously a lot going on there, and your leadership strategy.

Rogers:  I’m happy to.

 

Gamble:  Let’s start by getting a little bit of background information. Prisma is a large system with 18 acute care and specialty hospitals, correct?

Rogers:  Yes. We do a little over $5.5 billion and we have around 30,000 employees.

 

Gamble:  And you’re mostly in South Carolina?

Rogers:  We’re completely in South Carolina. Prism Health was formed through the merger of Greenville Health System (in Greenville, S.C.) and Palmetto Health System (in Columbia, S.C.).

 

Gamble:  You were with Greenville prior to the merger. Can you talk about what the organization did to come together as an integrated system? I’m sure that was an interesting experience.

Rogers:  Yes. It’s been more than four years now. And while I’ve been through a lot of acquisitions in my career, this was the first with two equal-sized systems. I had never worked in that type of environment.

Bringing two organizations together was culturally challenging as well. We had to interview for our jobs and get selected because we all had counterparts, so we had to go through that process. Then it was about understanding the business strategy going forward and what we need to support.

Sometimes with these types of mergers, you act as a holding company and let the health systems function autonomously in their own markets, and maybe have a small corporate umbrella for doing things like population health.

We quickly realized based on market forces that we needed to integrate and take out as much expense as possible so we could act as one health system. Once that decision was made, we started looking at our systems and how we could start bringing things together.

Big decisions – “It comes down to governance”

The EMR is always one of the most visible decisions that needs to be made. We were on Epic in our Greenville market and Cerner and Meditech in Columbia; one of our facilities had some long-term contracts in place. So that was a little bit more challenging, but it really comes down to governance and making sure we have the right representation. Even when it looks like it’s pretty obvious what you should do, you have to make sure you have a number of folks represented who voice that same opinion before you make a decision.

That’s what we did. Epic made the most sense for us long-term as both the EMR and revenue cycle vendor. Once we made the decision to implement Epic in one service area, it pretty much meant we were going to be one health system. Then we looked at ERP, which was the next core system. We had multiple instances of Infor at the time; once you make the decision to go to a single EMR, you can only land tractions to one GL, and so that forced us to make a decision. We evaluated where Infor was going and what were the costs involved, and saw that it wasn’t expensive. There were also some areas like HR that weren’t thrilled with their offering, and so we evaluated the market, went through another RFP process, and selected Workday as our ERP vendor.

Core system work