session HDM 02.13
Kristin Myers
Vice President – I. T.
Epic Clinical Transformation Group/Enterprise Project
Management Office , Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York
The Myers File
◉ Manager, Cap Gemini Ernst and Young, New York
◉ Systems Integration Architect/Manager,
Cerner Corp., Australia
◉ Bachelor of Laws/Bachelor of I. T., Queensland University
of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
Interview by Elizabeth Gardner
Kristin Myers was lured from Aus- tralia to New York by a consulting position that let her use her ear- lier health care experience with Cerner Corp., and one of her first
clients was 1,171-bed Mount Sinai Medical Center. In 2004, Mount Sinai convinced her to move
in-house. “I wanted to own my own programs and
projects, and not just come in at the tail end and
try to fix them,” she says. Her first assignment was
to analyze the failure of the organization’s latest
attempt at an EHR. Eight years later, Mount Sinai
won the prestigious Davies Award from HIMSS for
its enterprise Epic EHR implementation. Myers
managed the Epic project, which cost $127.5 million. The hospital expects to get $33.4 million in
federal meaningful use incentives (of which it has
already collected $8 million), and a total hard ROI
of more than $108 million through 2020, including
reduced medical records costs and sun-setting of
obsolete systems. The new system has contributed to many improvements in clinical indicators,
including a 56 percent drop in Medicare readmissions, and to a jump in patient satisfaction scores.
The percentage of patients who’d rate the hospital
a “ 9” or a “ 10” went from 53.4 percent in 2010 to
67.3 percent in 2012. Myers manages more than
100 employees, and focuses on building talent
from within rather than hiring consultants. She
talks about some of Mount Sinai’s success factors
and challenges.
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Many system implementations and selections had
taken place in the past, but for one reason or another, they hadn’t come together and penetrated
the organization. The efforts were very fragmented.
Robust leadership and governance structure were
needed to overcome all the obstacles. We had the
COO and the CEO as executive sponsors from the
very beginning, and we’ve had bi-weekly meetings
with them across all eight years.
Down Under Wonder
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We set up an office specifically for this project and
focused on project management methodologies.
Another critical factor was that we employed 20
nurses from the floor for nursing informatics, and
we paid for 15 to 20 physicians—between 10 percent and 70 percent of their time—to work on clinical informatics.
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Some physicians either had an EHR in their department or wanted to stay on paper. For some specialties, like ophthalmology or dermatology, paper
was just easier. We had many discussions trying
to get them on board. If we couldn’t, our executive
team would meet with them and say, ”This is an
institutional responsibility—you must do this. We
need it for meaningful use, to avoid penalties, and
as an infrastructure to build our ACO.” They used
their clout.
