The South Carolina Chapter of HIMSS is pleased to announce the presentations selected for their 2017 Fall Conference and Exhibition scheduled for October 27 at the Columbia Convention Center. The day’s presentations from recognized speakers, solution providers, and technical experts will enable you to gain insight and discuss strategic and practical implications while you discover real-world solutions to your health IT challenges.

Scheduled Presentations

Breaking Down Silos Can Spark Transformation in Unexpected Ways

Bill Johnson, Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services
Robert LaPorte, Blue Cirrus Consulting

Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services. located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is one of the top five U.S. largest nonprofit, free-standing behavioral health provider systems.  As the foundation of the strategic plan is to create a “One Pine Rest” organization, they embarked on a journey to select a full EMR that will be implemented throughout all of their service lines, including inpatient/partial hospitalization, residential and outpatient for adults, adolescents and child population.  As a brand-new install, replacing a patchwork of other systems, paper processes and the dissolution of an inpatient EMR joint venture partnership, it became a priority to define the total cost of ownership (TOC) for this project.  Having already successfully partnered with Blue Cirrus Consulting to help them with the EMR selection process, they extended that partnership to the development of a full TCO.  This presentation will outline the nuances of developing a complete and comprehensive TCO in this complex specialized service environment.  This strategic initiative sparked the silos move out of their comfort zones into an understanding of how to work together to reach a “One Pine Rest” goal.  The attendees will learn the areas that influenced organizational decisions, operational models and business practices.

Objective 1: Describe the top five organizational changes driven by the TCO
Objective 2: Discuss the primary drivers in the decision model
Objective 3: Recognize the top three benefits of a cost model discussion

Entering his 35th year in the Information Technology (IT) industry, Bill Johnson is Director of Information Systems for Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services.  He has spent the past 16 years in IT management including the last ten at Pine Rest.  His focus at Pine Rest has been to build stable, resilient and secure systems to support the organization’s worthy mission, working closely with business stakeholders to provide solutions and applications to assist in the delivery of quality health-based outcomes.  Bill holds a Master Degree with a concentration in Healthcare Business Management and a Bachelor’s Degree in Information Systems Business Management.  He is also a Certified Healthcare Chief Information Officer (CHCIO) as established by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME).

Bob LaPorte has been successfully delivering health IT solutions in the healthcare provider space for over 25 years.  In that time he has worked multiple contexts (provider, outsourcer, HIT vendor, consultancy) and multiple roles – from individual contributor to leading and focusing large technical teams and initiatives.  A South Carolina HIMSS Board member for the past eight years, he is currently serving as the Chapter’s Past-President.

Driving User Adoption for a Healthcare Communication Platform

Dr. Nicholas Perkins, D.O., Greenville Health Systems
Paul Tardif, Telmediq

Every hospital system faces communication challenges: non-HIPAA compliant messaging, inefficient paging systems and time-consuming workflows. Whether it’s requesting a consult, communicating an order or closing the loop on a critical lab result, communication that should take seconds can take several minutes to complete. Greenville Health Systems rolled out a communication platform that integrated with their EHR, call center, scheduling platforms, order notification and nurse call solutions to ensure clinicians received information, messages and notifications in a timely, accurate and meaningful way. In this session we’ll share how clinical involvement in the implementation phase ensured that the new communication platform was meaningful, interoperable and intuitive for its users and processes. We will also share their onboarding process, which included communicating the benefits of the platform to clinical staff and monitoring not just installs, but usage patterns to make meaningful changes. The real testament to success so far has been the steady “how do we get it” requests by other departments.

Objective 1: Latest research in informatics for selecting and implementing new technology in healthcare
Objective 2: Important factors for increasing user adoption
Objective 3: Valuable metrics to consider when assessing a technology’s success

Dr. Nicholas Perkins is an Internist, Hospitalist and Physician Informaticist in Greenville, South Carolina and is affiliated with multiple hospitals in the area, including GHS Greenville Memorial Hospital and GHS Greer Memorial Hospital. He is board certified in internal medicine and received his medical degree from Lincoln Memorial University DeBusk College of Osteopathic Medicine and is currently pursuing a masters in Biomedical Informatics. Dr. Perkins is also seeking board certification in Informatics, currently held by only 1,500 others across the country.  He currently serves a member of the Initiant Health Collaborative, with a focus on Information Technology projects, and on the Greenville Hospital System Information Services committees for meaningful use, data reporting and analytics and EHR physician advisory.

Paul Tardif is Senior Vice President of Clinical Communications Consulting at Telmediq, the leading provider of integrated healthcare communication solutions. With over 23 years of experience consulting within the global telecommunication market, Paul works closely with health IT executives focused on improving HCAHPS scores, nurse workflow and communication interoperability through the latest technological innovations. Paul holds an Electrical Engineering degree from Georgia Tech.

Playing the Numbers: Data-Driven Improvement Strategies for Population Health Panel discussion led by Aunyika Moonan, SCHA

A panel of speakers will present their different perspectives and  what they are doing to improve their “population”—whether it be in the community, in their network or within a clinical population using health/healthcare data to drive their decision making.

Objective 1: Understand how health/healthcare data guides leaders to make decisions that drive improvement  in their community
Objective 2: Statewide perspective on how organizations are tacking population health

Patient to Clinic Message Management Model Development for Specialty Clinics at an Academic Medical Center

Lauren Mattox, Medical University of South Carolina
Stacey Simmons, MSN, RN, Medical University of South Carolina

Patient to clinic message management is a time-sensitive, critical component of the patient-centered care delivery model where patients expect convenient access to their care team outside of the office visit. Clinical leadership often find themselves challenged with how to best allocate work, optimize roles and efficiently manage messages from creation to close in ways that do not strain staff and produce ideal outcomes for patients. Data and feedback showed that opportunities existed to improve both patient and staff satisfaction, within the messaging management process. To understand the barriers driving results and identify remedies for improvement, the project analyzed workflows beginning with the creation of an electronic message in the EMR by Centralized/Non-Clinical Patient Access Center (PAC) staff and managed to conclusion by the patient’s specialty clinic care team.

Objective 1: Improve patient to clinic message management satisfaction for patient and for staff
Objective 2: Develop standardized tools, resources and workflows to implement across the health system
Objective 3: Improve clinical data results to include turn-round time, call volume and CGCAHP scores
Objective 4: Improve patient access center results to include: average answer speed, abandon time, after call work, percentage of calls answered and max delay.

Lauren Mattox has seven  years of experience in  Healthcare – Informatics, Healthcare Information Management – plus 19 years  in new hire, leadership and technical training in the Insurance and

Telecommunications  industries.  She holds a Bachelor of Science, Business Administration, College of Charleston and Masters Certificate, Healthcare Information Management and Exchange, George Washington University.

Stacey Simmons has 23 years of experience in Healthcare – Nursing, with 15 years in the neurosciences including five years as a neurology clinic manager. She holds a Bachelor of Science, Nursing, University of Phoenix and a Masters Degree, Nursing, with an Informatics Focus, University of Phoenix.

Quality Matters: The New Data Dilemma

Jody Denson, Carolina eHealth Network and KaMMCO Health Solutions
David Gosset, Carolina eHealth Network

Physicians, practice managers, quality champions and other healthcare professionals need to be ready to access and effectively use clinical data in order to successfully transition into the new era of data-driven healthcare.  When Medicare’s payment programs reward quality over quantity, it’s clear the road to success relies upon confidence in high quality, accurate data, secured in a trusted health information exchange that delivers clear analysis of patients’ and populations’ healthcare trends. Physicians must identify and treat at-risk populations, proactively engage patients sooner, understand the performance of health interventions on health outcomes and reduce cost. This presentation is designed to provide physicians and clinicians with the knowledge to drive quality improvement and transform healthcare through the application of meaningful data analytics made possible by participation in a well-functioning health information exchange. Employing aggregated longitudinal clinical data can be a powerful strategy for all striving to successfully meet quality reporting requirements while improving population health management, risk management and clinical effectiveness.

Objective 1: Review quality metrics reporting possibilities as a result of involvement in a heath information exchange
Objective 2: Analyze quality reporting requirements, evaluate available data sources, and formulate a plan for quality reporting
Objective 3: Access longitudinal medical records to favorably affect patients’ care and community health
Objective 4: Calculate the use of business intelligence analytics to improve patient care and impact the bottom line

Jody Denson is the Director of Provider Solutions at KaMMCO Health Solutions. She has over 18 years of experience in the healthcare field with an emphasis in working with safety net providers and community mental health centers. Jody is a certified Project Management Professional and holds a BS in Psychology and a Master’s of Public Administration, both from the University of Missouri in Kansas City. She is an adjunct professor at Johnson County Community College and teaches courses in Health Information Technology.

David Gossett is a regional director for the Carolina eHealth Network and has worked in the healthcare information technology arena for more than 20 years. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Marketing from the University of Georgia and a Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting from Georgia State University.  He has a wealth of experience in working with the healthcare teams to help identify, create and drive health system specific solutions that deliver significant improvement through increased revenues, margins and workplace productivity.