When an organization achieves Epic Gold Stars Level 10, it means they’re doing something exceptionally well. In fact, just 17 health systems across the world — 0.3 percent of all Epic users — have earned the title. And so, when RWJBarnabas Health joined the elite club last fall, it was extremely validating for Jordan Ruch, who has served as IT Project Director for the enterprise Epic implementation. “We have an unbelievable team,” he said.

During a recent interview with Kate Gamble, Managing Director at healthsystemCIO, Ruch discussed the “comprehensive approach” his team has adopted to drive results, “from system selection to implementation to go-live support and optimization,” and how they leverage metrics to ensure goals are being met. Ruch, who has been with the organization for 21 years, also talked the building blocks of transformation, why adaptability is such a critical component of success, and how his background in project management helped prepare him for the CTO role.

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

Key Takeaways

* In addition to the Epic rollout, which has been “an amazing transformation on the clinical side,” RWJBarnabas recently implemented ServiceNow and is migrating all employees to Microsoft Teams.

* “When any health system grows the amount that we have over the past 5 or 6 years, there needs to be a focused effort on standardization, or else you end up with a flea market infrastructure.”

* One of the keys to achieving Epic Gold Stars Level 10 is the organization’s metrics-driven approach. “Our build and our implementation of Epic is a very measured and a very heavily planned project.”

* Another is providing consistent support for users. “Go-live support is an area in which we’re heavily invested. We’re there, shoulder to shoulder, during the activation.”

* With any major change, “there are going to be issues. There are going to be things you missed, or things that need to get tweaked, or items that you don’t know about until you activate.”

Q&A with Jordan Ruch, CTO, RWJBarnabas Health

Gamble:  Hi Jordan, thanks so much for taking time to speak. I’d like to talk about some of the initiatives you’re working on, including the Epic rollout, and get the perspective of the CTO.

Ruch:  Glad to be here. We have a lot going on. You brought up one of the big transformations — Epic. I’m the IT project lead for that. It started with the vendor selection process, which involved thousands of people from my organization. We ended up having pretty unprecedented involvement across the board. I think there were 3,000 individuals who were part of the process. Ultimately the decision was Epic — it was unanimous. That was about three and a half years ago.

“It’s been an amazing transformation”

We’ve been doing rollouts throughout all of 2021 and 2022 after having our build finalized. But it has been an amazing transformation on the clinical side. And so, standardizing from many platforms down to Epic is probably the largest transformation that any healthcare system can go through. It’s definitely the largest project we’ve ever taken on, but it’s been fantastic.

That’s just the clinical side. From an organizational transformation perspective, there are two other major tracks I’ve been working on. I could talk a lot about Epic, but we’re also going through a business and collaboration tool transformation at the same time. We’ve decided to standardize our implementation of Microsoft tools. Last year, we negotiated a deal to provide that to all of our employees. At many organizations,