What is your primary responsibility as senior VP of Premier's Healthcare Informatics Division?
My primary responsibility is to set the overall direction/vision for Premier’s Informatics division while ensuring operational execution. My day to day tends to be a general manager-type role overseeing all functional organizational aspects of the business.
What do you figure will be the toughest part of your job?
The toughest part will be to keep up with the ever-changing healthcare technology landscape. Our industry is in a constant state of flux with many moving parts tied to regulations (ARRA meaningful use, CMS, etc), competition, and evolving data standards. The core business of Premier’s informatics unit is aggregating data from many different types of systems so all of these issues are relevant. The key for us is to stay relevant in an ever-changing landscape. This is really my primary responsibility.
You are a self-proclaimed "data junky." How does that influence your work?
I have always relied on data to make any type of decision in both my work life as well as personal. Everyone has opinions but the key is to back your insight with reliable and consistent data. I try to run the informatics business with data-driven insights just as our data products helps providers run their business.
What is the one thing most hospital executives don't know about driving performance?
There are a lot of different players and initiatives driving performance throughout your typical hospital or IDN. You have your clinical leadership driving patient safety, patient experience, and quality outcomes. You have your finance leadership driving cost outcomes. The key is how you bring this all together to truly drive system level performance. If you look at Premier’s QUEST initiative, integrated system level performance management was at the heart of it. Trying to bring all parties to the table and drive holistic outcomes across evidence-based medicine, mortality, patient experience, cost, and harm avoidance is the key to driving performance. We have 200 hospitals that participate in QUEST but believe it’s an initiative that could be embraced by all providers across the country.
Healthcare IT News Editor Bernie Monegain interviews Keith Figlioli, senior vice president of Premier Healthcare Informatics. The self-proclaimed "data junkie" was a formerly with Eclipsys as vice president of enterprise solutions.
What is the single most difficult challenge hospitals are facing today on the informatics front?
I believe it is data liquidity. As an industry, we all need to focus on freeing up data in each of the silos across the many stakeholders. This effort will take years and will not be solely focused on data standards. My fear right now is that most data standards efforts are still focused on point-to-point sharing rather than how our healthcare system may evolve to population management. Making data usable across a healthcare community with so many different stakeholders is a daunting challenge for all of us.
Will hospitals "look" different 10 years from now? How?
I do believe the landscape will look different in 10 years. The Accountable Care Organization concept has tremendous potential if the right support gets behind it. If we see momentum on this front in the next few years, the discussion will shift to how we are managing the overall health of a community’s population. The hospital will play a key role in this evolution given its governance structure and trusted status in each community.
What are you reading?
“SWAY – The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior” by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman. It is a great book on how people aren’t rational with most of their decisions in life.
