Transcript:

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Jordan Cooper
We’re here today with Doctor Robert Adamson, the Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Robert Wood Johnson, Barnabas Health.

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Jordan Cooper
Doctor Adamson is the operational leader for the Epic electronic health record implementation at RWJ Barnabas and previously was a chief pharmacy officer and characterizes himself as more of an informaticist than a technologist.

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Jordan Cooper
For those who don’t know, as background Robert Wood Johnson, Barnabas Health is a health system based in West Orange, NJ, with 4500 beds and 11,500 providers in 19 hospitals and other care facilities.

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Jordan Cooper
There’s also New Jersey’s largest private employer, with 33,000 employees.

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Jordan Cooper
So, Doctor Adamson, I know that you’re in the middle of an epic conversion that includes the entire health system.

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Jordan Cooper
Hospital physician practices.

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Jordan Cooper
Also, Rutgers Medical School, if you could characterize how you’ve been able to organize a team in six words pertaining to this epic conversion, how would you do so?

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Adamson, Rob
Yeah.

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Adamson, Rob
Thank you so much for having me.

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Adamson, Rob
And and what I would say is when I when I thought about the IT NS group, I needed to come up with a way where we can organize everything that we needed to do around six words and we actually have a logo called Aspire and that is stands for a is for advocacy as is for security.

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Adamson, Rob
P is people centric.

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Adamson, Rob
I is innovation R as resources and E is excellence and what’s wonderful is if you were to go to an agenda, any one of our IT NS groups, it’s organized the exact same 6 words.

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Adamson, Rob
If you look at our strategic plan, same 6 words.

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Adamson, Rob
If you look at all the bowls, whether they’re individual goals or shared goals, it’s the same 6 words, so it winds up happening is when I do my one on ones.

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Adamson, Rob
Whenever I’m doing anything with this team, everybody knows what other 6 words, what is true north and then how are we gonna organize things?

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Adamson, Rob
One of the things we found with the epic conversion, and as must have you know, a lot of you’ve probably done this before, but many of you may not have done this through COVID and we were knee deep right into where we needed to activate the project and there was a lot of pressure to actually put the project on hold and pause it.

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Adamson, Rob
So I said, well, I don’t understand why we’re making such an emotional decision.

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Adamson, Rob
I said we need to do something with a little more scientific rigor.

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Adamson, Rob
So what I basically said was let’s go through every work group that we have and there were 170 of those.

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Adamson, Rob
True if half of them are not going to be available during COVID, then sure, we would stop.

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Jordan Cooper
And.

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Jordan Cooper
Mm-hmm.

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Adamson, Rob
But if really we have more than if we have less than 1/3 that are completely unavailable, then I think we should move forward strategically.

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Jordan Cooper
Umm.

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Adamson, Rob
As an example, if you’re an interventional cardiologist, they were readily available, but if you worked in the Ed, obviously you were not.

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Adamson, Rob
And So what we did is we went through that and instead of making it a yes or a no question, it became one of what’s the availability.

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Adamson, Rob
And then could we actually meet more frequently with the ones who are available and less frequently with the ones who weren’t?

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Adamson, Rob
And then what we did is we took the Epic playbook and we redid the entire things that all the people who are out of pocket went last in the decisions.

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Adamson, Rob
All the ones that were available went first in the decisions and by doing that and working with EPIC, I’m proud to say that we went live on time and under budget right through the pandemic without any changes or or any stops.

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Adamson, Rob
All of this was because of a strategic pause.

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Adamson, Rob
Rather than making it a binary question, you can go and say let’s ask the question differently.

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Adamson, Rob
I know you can’t.

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Adamson, Rob
We meet every week.

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Adamson, Rob
Could you meet at least one hour once a month?

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Adamson, Rob
Just so we can keep advancing and when you give people different choices, you get different answers.

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Adamson, Rob
And then what we did was we were able to thread that needle and the team did a remarkable job with that.

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Jordan Cooper
So yeah, it sounds like you started a 5 year project.

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Jordan Cooper
That was is expected to be completed in 2024.

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Jordan Cooper
So you started in 2019 and your average weekly tasks that were accomplished rose from 33 to 18496 by April.

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Jordan Cooper
I think of 2020.

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Jordan Cooper
You’re up to 521.

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Jordan Cooper
You even went up to 13109 tasks accomplished in one week.

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Jordan Cooper
Can you speak about that level of productivity and and how you’ve sustained it after COVID if you have?

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Adamson, Rob
Yeah.

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Adamson, Rob
So great question.

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Adamson, Rob
So one of the things was there was a high degree of aversion to going fully remote.

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Adamson, Rob
The thought was at the time.

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Adamson, Rob
Now it’s sort of something that no one would ever believe moving forward, but back in the day, people are like, wait a minute.

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Adamson, Rob
If they’re gonna be remote, how are they going to be productive and what we found that was just the opposite.

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Adamson, Rob
We found that no one was commuting to work.

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Adamson, Rob
No one had time to move around and start talking about different things.

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Adamson, Rob
How did a particular baseball team do last night?

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Adamson, Rob
Those kind of things kind of got devoid and it turned out we actually got more efficient.

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Jordan Cooper
Mm-hmm.

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Adamson, Rob
Well, because we are for the most part fully remote with some hybrid positions.

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Adamson, Rob
Obviously, those that are patient facing, customer facing, et cetera.

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Jordan Cooper
Umm.

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Jordan Cooper
Mm-hmm.

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Adamson, Rob
Those aside, what we found was by keeping everybody remote, we took the same exact playbook and just kept moving forward, which was to do this in an efficient manner.

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Adamson, Rob
We we discovered that people flying in for the week, as an example, rather than doing that, gave them all this availability and we actually got more productivity.

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Adamson, Rob
We had the opposite problem, which was how to get people to shut off and to shut down.

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Adamson, Rob
And So what we did is we did a lot of things that forced function where we said this is protected time.

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Adamson, Rob
You have to take your protected time.

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Jordan Cooper
Umm.

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Adamson, Rob
This is the time we’re all gonna get together and celebrate something that has nothing to do with this job and get to know each other.

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Adamson, Rob
And by inserting those kind of points, we’ve maintained that to this day we do 2 huge events, one in the middle of the year and the end of the year where more than 6 to 700 of our colleagues of the 903 and all of it TNS, we’ll get together for unity purpose mission and then celebrations.

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Jordan Cooper
And you’re saying, so I noticed.

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Jordan Cooper
I just wanna follow up on what you on both items that you said.

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Jordan Cooper
So epic and estimated productivity would decrease 30 to 40% by people not being in the office.

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Jordan Cooper
And what you actually found was a 43% increase in productivity.

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Jordan Cooper
But what also many of our listeners would identify with is though. They saw increased productivity during COVID. Many of our listeners.

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Jordan Cooper
Other healthcare organizations around the country have also seen increased provider burnout and I think what you just mentioned is that those two events a year OHH allows for more socialization reduction and burnout.

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Jordan Cooper
Would you be able to speak to provider engagement and and burnout and how you’ve been addressing that?

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Adamson, Rob
Yeah.

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Adamson, Rob
So in essence, what we find is, and I’m sure you understand this and that is when you’re home sitting talking into a screen, there is no natural way to tell you to stop.

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Adamson, Rob
And So what we did is we inserted for both providers the people in it and S there were scheduled times that we have protected time and we call it a siesta Fiesta.

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Jordan Cooper
Hmm.

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Adamson, Rob
And so it basically what it said was siesta is essentially when you need to take time away and you’re completely out of pocket.

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Adamson, Rob
You’re protected so that you don’t actually have to have a meeting at that time.

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Jordan Cooper
Umm.

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Adamson, Rob
That’s the csta time and then Fiesta is when you were encouraged to take your time away.

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Jordan Cooper
Mm-hmm.

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Adamson, Rob
Obviously with active go lives, there are a couple of periods where we would prefer nobody would be out for obvious reasons.

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Adamson, Rob
You either going up leading up to a go live, or obviously you’re supporting and stabilizing after a go live.

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Adamson, Rob
So those are those are times where nobody really can be off.

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Adamson, Rob
But what we do is we use something called Fiesta Siesta and that’s what we refer to people to remind people that there needs to be a siesta and then obviously there needs to be an engagement with your family.

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Adamson, Rob
Get back with your family and have a Fiesta with them.

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Jordan Cooper
So you’ve mentioned about you’ve spoken so far about this epic together strategic pause and this was for the epic migration, especially within the context of a fully remote workforce due to the pandemic.

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Jordan Cooper
But would like to quote you.

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Jordan Cooper
You said we found out that 70% of the people we needed to build the system were fully available to keep making decisions.

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Jordan Cooper
So I directed the team that put all people who weren’t available at the end of the build, and all people were available to move them.

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Jordan Cooper
And move them forward.

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Jordan Cooper
So what I like to ask is the numbers that you have produced due to your strategic approach to prioritization of this particular go live are very impressive.

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Jordan Cooper
I’d like, but of course the the the pandemic is in our past.

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Jordan Cooper
Hopefully there won’t be another one.

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Jordan Cooper
You’re moving towards the end of this epic implementation and I think a lot of our listeners are saying this is great, but how could I apply these lessons to other sorts of task and strategic initiatives at my organization?

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Jordan Cooper
Would you be able to perhaps tell how you’ve taken some of these lessons and applied them elsewhere?

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Jordan Cooper
Robert Wood Johnson and and also showing how to prioritize balance and increase productivity elsewhere in the organization.

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Adamson, Rob
Yeah.

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Adamson, Rob
So one of the things we found with IT&S is that I I did an inventory of all the meetings that we were attending as a group and I characterized them in three buckets, early awareness, mid awareness and laid awareness.

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Adamson, Rob
And what we found was the majority of our meetings were laid awareness, which means we were getting this information at the end and then scrambling to get this all done.

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Adamson, Rob
What I tried to do is move the entire team to early awareness.

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Adamson, Rob
So as an example to your point, when I find out that there are three construction delays, why would I want people to keep continue going down that road of wiring a building that doesn’t have a certificate of occupancy for us to even get in there?

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Jordan Cooper
Mm-hmm.

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Adamson, Rob
Can redirect those resources to something that’s fully ready, ready to go, so that we maximize capacity management.

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Adamson, Rob
The only way you can do that as an it and this organization is to move from the mid and late awareness to the early awareness.

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Adamson, Rob
So something as simple as working in a hospital?

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Adamson, Rob
I asked a simple question, show a hands all of the site directors.

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Adamson, Rob
Which one of you is on the Space Planning Committee and only half of them raised their hand, which means the other half didn’t even realize that they were changing spaces.

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Adamson, Rob
Changing new locations, doing these things, the whole hospital.

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Adamson, Rob
New but IT then you wonder why there’s this mad dash at the end.

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Jordan Cooper
Mm-hmm.

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Adamson, Rob
And so by moving to taking an inventory of what I call the early, mid and late awareness, I have early awareness which means best information.

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Adamson, Rob
So I can redirect things much the same way Reid did with the strategic pause.

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Adamson, Rob
Obviously when I’m pausing things, I’m not going to focus on that.

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Jordan Cooper
Mm-hmm.

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Adamson, Rob
I’m gonna focus on what’s available that I could build during the epic, have built and the same thing is true here.

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Adamson, Rob
Why would I focus all their time on something that I already now know won’t be ready for us?

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Jordan Cooper
Mm-hmm.

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Adamson, Rob
And now what do I do so we redirect those people so that project is basically sitting in a pause, but I only know that because I’m at the right meetings and at the right cadence.

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Adamson, Rob
And I know where that information’s coming from.

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Jordan Cooper
So you’ve mentioned that right now Robert Wood, Johnson, Barnabas is involved in restructuring of the ITN.

0:11:26.650 –> 0:11:31.120
Jordan Cooper
S stands for information technology and services function and also governance.

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Jordan Cooper
You’ve just spoken a little bit about how you’re prioritizing meetings.

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Jordan Cooper
Is some sounds almost like a lean Sigma approach, but would you be able to delve deeper into the restructuring of the whole function and governance as well?

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Adamson, Rob
Yeah.

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Adamson, Rob
Great question.

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Adamson, Rob
So, uh, what we had was we had people meeting in silos and in, I would say in lanes of function, you know, security team was meeting as a security team, but there wasn’t a broader governance beyond that.

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Adamson, Rob
And so the first thing we established was an IT and Executive Council.

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Adamson, Rob
So I’m proud to say I’ve 16 Vice President, colleagues that I’m a member of, and those sixteen are in all these different lanes.

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Adamson, Rob
That’s the Executive Council that is the final.

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Adamson, Rob
That’s the final decision.

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Jordan Cooper
This is.

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Adamson, Rob
So I have underneath that and IT&S steering council.

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Adamson, Rob
They deal with just internal IT things.

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Adamson, Rob
Then we have an IT and S strategic council.

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Adamson, Rob
That’s customer facing operations.

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Adamson, Rob
That’s altogether those are recommending bodies feeding up to our Executive Council, which is the only Council that can endorse any of those decisions.

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Jordan Cooper
Umm.

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Adamson, Rob
Then sitting underneath these, we have a number of things, but the one I’m most proud of is the Workforce Committee, which is actually made up in three or four lanes.

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Adamson, Rob
We have a ladders program.

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Adamson, Rob
We have a capacity management program, work life balance program etcetera and it’s made up of its share and a vice chair of the membership of our actual group and then obviously groups on each one of those committees.

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Jordan Cooper
Mm-hmm.

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Adamson, Rob
All of these will funnel up to the governance so that they can make recommendations, ultimately so that the executive team can either endorse, change, migrate, fix, etcetera.

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Adamson, Rob
Prior to that, there was a lot of email confirmations people saying things like why I spoke to so and so and so and so. I think we’re good to go.

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Jordan Cooper
Mm-hmm.

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Adamson, Rob
That’s awareness and that’s institutional knowledge.

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Adamson, Rob
That’s not governance.

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Adamson, Rob
What we wanted to do is to make sure that there was a polarity to it to say hey, I I need a motion to approve going to Robert’s rules of order.

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Adamson, Rob
All of those things have made all of our decisions.

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Adamson, Rob
I like to call it durable.

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Adamson, Rob
What we had in the past was decisions that were made and then remade several times, and then that caused scope creep, delays, et cetera by making it an inclusive process with all the stakeholders within itns, you now have plurality and now you also have a multidisciplinary approach, which means once we all agree, you can’t come back later and say I didn’t know.

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Adamson, Rob
And so once we all have that as a unified voice, our decisions have been very durable.

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Adamson, Rob
Where in the past they weren’t as durable because of a lack of governance.

0:14:14.320 –> 0:14:22.610
Jordan Cooper
So I find it interesting there’s a theme of prioritizing time and ensuring efficiency in decision making.

0:14:22.680 –> 0:14:34.830
Jordan Cooper
You spoke about the epic together strategic pause and how you identified certain stakeholders at the organization who are available now for this thing and others who weren’t, and you affected your schedule accordingly.

0:14:34.920 –> 0:14:43.690
Jordan Cooper
You’ve and so you’ve also spoken about different sorts of meetings, meetings that were early, mid, late awareness where a lot of the meetings had been.

0:14:43.880 –> 0:14:47.850
Jordan Cooper
I wanna just ask a general question which is delegation.

0:14:48.240 –> 0:14:50.510
Jordan Cooper
You said there’s lots of different subcommittees.

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Jordan Cooper
You said there’s a workforce committee.

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Jordan Cooper
There’s a a strategy committee, but how have you been balancing delegating committees versus having too many meetings and committees?

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Jordan Cooper
Because again, there’s work that needs to be done.

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Adamson, Rob
Mm-hmm.

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Jordan Cooper
You need to prioritize things in order to get work done, so it sounds like there’s a lot of structure and governance, and now there’s a proliferation of meetings and committees.

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Jordan Cooper
How have you struck a balance between delegating and ensuring that there is a unanimous decision and that we are moving forward with transparency versus too many meetings committees preventing us from doing our work?

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Adamson, Rob
Yeah.

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Adamson, Rob
So what you need is the first thing I decided is what are recommending bodies?

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Adamson, Rob
What are endorsing bodies?

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Adamson, Rob
And So what?

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Adamson, Rob
You don’t wanna have is 25 meetings to get to the final decision.

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Adamson, Rob
That’s woefully inefficient.

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Adamson, Rob
On the other hand, you can’t have no decisions, so it’s it’s always that thing where you want to have the minimum necessary.

0:15:44.50 –> 0:15:44.300
Jordan Cooper
Mm-hmm.

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Adamson, Rob
And so in essence, what we did is we did an inventory of all of our meetings.

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Adamson, Rob
If you could see my office, I had them all strewn on my walls.

0:15:52.120 –> 0:15:57.390
Adamson, Rob
And then each group had to come in and say I said if we didn’t have this meeting, what would happen?

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Adamson, Rob
And a lot of cases, they said nothing I said.

0:16:0.830 –> 0:16:9.760
Adamson, Rob
Well, then, maybe we don’t need this meeting and we went through an inventory of what meetings made sense, which ones still made sense, and then what was the gap?

0:16:9.770 –> 0:16:11.840
Adamson, Rob
What were the things that didn’t connect these?

0:16:12.50 –> 0:16:16.20
Adamson, Rob
And so we actually deactivated a number of committees that just didn’t make sense.

0:16:16.30 –> 0:16:17.440
Adamson, Rob
They weren’t really effective.

0:16:17.550 –> 0:16:21.110
Adamson, Rob
And then align new ones that were actually already there.

0:16:21.120 –> 0:16:22.780
Adamson, Rob
They were just realigned.

0:16:23.30 –> 0:16:25.880
Adamson, Rob
This one was sitting by itself, but it led to nowhere.

0:16:26.50 –> 0:16:27.680
Adamson, Rob
I’m like, well, do you make a decision?

0:16:27.810 –> 0:16:28.600
Adamson, Rob
Where does it go?

0:16:28.610 –> 0:16:32.120
Adamson, Rob
And they said great question, don’t know as well.

0:16:32.130 –> 0:16:33.420
Adamson, Rob
Let’s get that connected.

0:16:33.570 –> 0:16:35.800
Adamson, Rob
So there was two bodies of work I would say.

0:16:35.810 –> 0:16:38.160
Adamson, Rob
We stood up a handful of committees.

0:16:39.490 –> 0:16:39.710
Jordan Cooper
Mm-hmm.

0:16:38.290 –> 0:16:48.600
Adamson, Rob
Net new the majority of this honestly was just realignment to make sure that when a decision was made somewhere, it went in a broad enough audience.

0:16:48.610 –> 0:16:51.70
Adamson, Rob
So everybody knew about a particular project.

0:16:51.80 –> 0:16:52.400
Adamson, Rob
What was the timeline?

0:16:52.410 –> 0:16:53.560
Adamson, Rob
Who owned what?

0:16:53.770 –> 0:16:54.980
Adamson, Rob
Etcetera, etcetera.

0:16:58.980 –> 0:16:59.210
Jordan Cooper
Mm-hmm.

0:16:55.250 –> 0:17:1.90
Adamson, Rob
And one of the ways we do that is through a product called work front, which is a project management tool that we use.

0:17:1.100 –> 0:17:8.970
Adamson, Rob
Everything goes through work front, so everybody now obviously knows who’s got what, who’s tasks or what.

0:17:9.180 –> 0:17:16.10
Adamson, Rob
And that there are dependencies that are related to governance, but I wouldn’t say it’s onerous because I don’t wanna portray that.

0:17:16.20 –> 0:17:17.980
Adamson, Rob
I stood up 31 new committees.

0:17:18.490 –> 0:17:18.720
Jordan Cooper
Mm-hmm.

0:17:32.370 –> 0:17:32.570
Jordan Cooper
Mm-hmm.

0:17:18.400 –> 0:17:33.240
Adamson, Rob
I would say I stood up probably 3 committees overarching the ones I talked about and then the Workforce committee was to give back to our colleagues giving by the people that were asked to lead a voice back to us in a structured way.

0:17:33.250 –> 0:17:34.940
Adamson, Rob
That’s basically what we stood up.

0:17:34.950 –> 0:17:36.720
Adamson, Rob
So it wasn’t hundreds of things.

0:17:36.730 –> 0:17:37.810
Adamson, Rob
It was just the opposite.

0:17:37.820 –> 0:17:39.800
Adamson, Rob
Peeling the onion to get to the core.

0:17:40.680 –> 0:17:41.280
Jordan Cooper
Excellent.

0:17:41.870 –> 0:18:9.200
Jordan Cooper
We are approaching the end of this podcast episode, so just to get some high level overviews in terms of setting the the context for this migration to epic you were I guess you know if you were to characterize the the the migration process, you know what EHR did you migrate from kind of how many years of clinical data are you importing into epic?

0:18:9.570 –> 0:18:11.200
Jordan Cooper
How many years are you archiving?

0:18:11.210 –> 0:18:16.410
Jordan Cooper
What are you doing to allow clinicians access to data that isn’t being imported into epic?

0:18:16.480 –> 0:18:25.0
Jordan Cooper
Just kind of some of the high level questions that people who are going through a similar epic migration may be facing themselves just quick high level overview.

0:18:25.420 –> 0:18:25.790
Adamson, Rob
Yes.

0:18:39.280 –> 0:18:39.580
Jordan Cooper
Umm.

0:18:25.800 –> 0:18:40.450
Adamson, Rob
So we we had to migrate from three different systems, Allscripts, Cerner and the last one will be meta tech which is next year those those data were actually five years worth of data was brought into EPIC.

0:18:40.460 –> 0:18:44.450
Adamson, Rob
So when you went live with epic, you had five years worth of patient data.

0:18:44.910 –> 0:18:45.120
Jordan Cooper
Umm.

0:18:44.840 –> 0:18:54.780
Adamson, Rob
Anything greater than five years we we archived everything and it was completely retrievable in context when we actually put that into the database.

0:18:54.790 –> 0:18:59.280
Adamson, Rob
So if you’re in epic, you can look at your archive and sort it pretty efficiently.

0:19:14.270 –> 0:19:14.560
Jordan Cooper
Umm.

0:18:59.370 –> 0:19:15.200
Adamson, Rob
To find anything greater than five years old, we candidly, as a former clinician, there’s very little utility beyond five years, perhaps, maybe legal and maybe research is the only two I could think of other than that really five years we thought was very generous for clinicians, which is what we did.

0:19:22.500 –> 0:19:22.770
Jordan Cooper
Umm.

0:19:15.210 –> 0:19:23.560
Adamson, Rob
So it’s five years worth of data came in and we went from 3 disparate systems, three different financial systems, two different labs systems.

0:19:23.570 –> 0:19:40.230
Adamson, Rob
I can go on and on and on, all consolidating into one as third parties we we turned off nearly 153rd parties turned on and maybe about 80 new ones and then maybe needed to upgrade some of the ones to either enterprise or some newer version.

0:19:40.850 –> 0:19:41.560
Jordan Cooper
Hmm.

0:19:41.600 –> 0:19:42.260
Jordan Cooper
Excellent.

0:19:42.390 –> 0:19:44.710
Jordan Cooper
Well, I really do appreciate your time.

0:19:45.230 –> 0:19:48.720
Jordan Cooper
Any closing thoughts that you’d like to offer to somebody listening?

0:19:48.730 –> 0:19:55.820
Jordan Cooper
Perhaps if you had a, you know, one wish, if you had a genie in a magic lamp and you could, and you could rub it.

0:19:55.830 –> 0:19:56.180
Jordan Cooper
What?

0:19:56.230 –> 0:20:1.180
Jordan Cooper
You know what would your one wish be if you could have something solved at your organization?

0:20:1.250 –> 0:20:1.360
Jordan Cooper
Yeah.

0:20:2.210 –> 0:20:10.490
Adamson, Rob
The thing that I wish for as a leader, quite frankly, is I knew all 903 people as much as I wanted to.

0:20:10.590 –> 0:20:19.600
Adamson, Rob
I don’t know them all as best I want to know them all because this is my family and I don’t know the family members as well as I’d like to because you’re just so many of them.

0:20:20.60 –> 0:20:20.270
Jordan Cooper
Hmm.

0:20:19.780 –> 0:20:23.190
Adamson, Rob
And so my wish is to have those interactions to get to know them better.

0:20:24.500 –> 0:20:25.610
Jordan Cooper
Thank you, rob.

0:20:25.620 –> 0:20:44.830
Jordan Cooper
For listeners, just has been doctor Robert Adamson, a pharmacist by training, the executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of the Robert Wood Johnson, Robert Wood Johnson, Barnabas Health of current operational leader, the Epic EHR implementation, and previously the Chief Pharmacy officer of RWJ, Barnabas.

0:20:45.160 –> 0:20:46.760
Jordan Cooper
Rob, thank you so much for joining us today.

0:20:47.220 –> 0:20:47.850
Adamson, Rob
You’re welcome.

0:20:47.860 –> 0:20:48.250
Adamson, Rob
Take care.