Hospital CEO Resigns Over Failed EHR Implementation

The social media world has grabbed on to a story at Athens Regional where it looks like the poorly done Cerner EHR implementation has “forced” the CEO to resign. Before I talk about the story, I’ve been amazed at how many tweets and retweets there have been for this story. It’s like the proverbial rubber neck we all get when we pass a car accident. I guess reading about a CEO resigning over a failed EHR implementation is must tweet HIT.

Getting back to the story, it seems like the real death nail in this hospital CEO’s coffin was when the doctors started dropping their privileges at the hospital. Here’s a quote from the story linked above:

“The Cerner implementation has driven some physicians to drop their active staff privileges at ARMC,” noted the letter. “This has placed an additional burden on the hospitalists, who are already overwhelmed. Other physicians are directing their patients to St. Mary’s (hospital) for outpatient studies, (emergency room) care, admissions and surgical procedures. … Efforts to rebuild the relationships with patients and physicians (needs) to begin immediately.”

The comments on the article are quite interesting with one doctor talking about how doctors were finally taking control and pointing out the harm these EHR systems are causing. Obviously, I think that’s a huge stretch. Uncooperative doctors can contribute to the harm an EHR can cause as much as the EHR software itself. Although there is a subset of doctors that feel like they need to start a revolution against EHR.

The reality is that the job of hospital CEO isn’t easy. That’s why they get paid millions of dollars (at least a lot of them). In fact, leadership in general is not easy. It’s a hard balance to know when you should trust your team and when you need to dig a little deeper and find out what’s really going on. Either way, this story should be a huge warning to hospital CEOs that they better have a deeper relationship with the hospital CIO.

I’m always surprised when a hospital still doesn’t have the hospital CIO as part of the executive team. Going forward, your EHR and other healthcare IT is going to be one of the biggest factors in the success of your organization. This story illustrates that really well.

I think we’d all agree that the number one thing you can do as a leader is make sure you hire and retain the very best employees. This story is a great example of why your EHR and how you implement it matters when it comes to getting and retaining the very best people. Plus, this is only going to become more important as technology continues to improve.

I obviously don’t know the particulars of this specific story. No doubt there are a few hundred views of what happened. Although considering the stories of what’s coming out, I’m guessing there is plenty of blame to go around. The hospital CEO was just the scapegoat for much larger issues.

Let this be a warning to hospital leadership. Make sure you’re paying enough attention to healthcare IT. It’s now an integral part of what you do.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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