For Yale New Haven Health, one of the key components in being able to successfully launch a hospital-at-home initiative was maintaining “the simple connectivity and continuity of the medical record,” said Lisa Stump, SVP and Chief Information and Digital Transformation Officer, in a recent podcast interview. The others, which are just as critical, are appointing the right people to help lead the project and identifying an outside partner that can provide the missing pieces.

During the discussion, Stump also talked about the challenges Yale New Haven Health is facing with retaining IT talent; how her team was able to draw on relationships and trust during the most difficult days of Covid-19; and why it’s so important for leaders to be able to tie the everyday work teams are doing to the mission of healthcare.

LISTEN HERE USING THE PLAYER BELOW OR SUBSCRIBE THROUGH YOUR FAVORITE PODCASTING SERVICE. 

Key Takeaways:

* When it comes to IT applications, the philosophy is to utilize Epic first, said Stump. “Sometimes we need a little bit more sophistication than some of those specialty modules provide; but for the most part, we try to keep a true enterprise platform.”

* “We had many of the right pieces and parts, we just didn’t have all of the right pieces and parts,” said Stump, explaining why her team sought an outside partner to create the hospital at home.

* A critical step in rolling out new technology is to run “a full clinical dress rehearsal,” which YNHH did with its mission control piece. “We kicked the tires made sure all the technology worked as we would have expected it to.”

* Another key benefit in partnering with an outside organization? The relationships they’ve developed with third-party providers. “We didn’t have to do our own market assessments and negotiate contracts. I don’t think we would be live yet if we had to create it all.”

Q&A with Lisa Stump, Yale New Haven Health, Part 1

Gamble:  Hi Lisa, thank you, as always for your time. I want to talk about what your team is working on, and how your strategies have evolved in the past two years. First, can you give a high-level overview of Yale-New Haven Health?

Stump:  Yale New Haven Health System is a 5-hospital network across seven inpatient campuses that span Rhode Island and Connecticut. We are also supporting our northeast medical group physician practice, which has over 300 locations in New York, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. And we have a close partnership with the Yale School of Medicine and the Yale Medicine Specialty Physician Practices. We employ about 28,000 employees across our health system. We’re about a $4.5 billion enterprise.

 

Gamble:  And you have Epic in the hospitals or is it pretty much Epic across the board at this point?

Stump:  We are Epic across the enterprise inpatient/outpatient, revenue cycle, access and then some of the specialty areas like dental. Our philosophy generally is, it’s all in Epic unless it can’t be. So sometimes we need a little bit more sophistication than some of those specialty modules provide through Epic; but for the most part, we try to keep a true enterprise platform.

 

Gamble:  Right. So I wanted to talk about the home hospital program that was recently launched. The ‘why’ is pretty clear with something like this, but the ‘how’ is probably much more tricky. Can you about how it came about and what it has taken for your team to get it up and running?

Stump:  The ‘why’ is pretty clear.  For us, it was a combination of really needing to address prolonged length of stay and constrained capacity in our inpatient hospital...