On February 7, 2023, an electrical fire started in an equipment room located within the Service Building at Brockton Hospital. Battling the 10-alarm blaze meant having to shut off the utility power and emergency generators, which cut off access to computer systems, elevators, phones, medical devices and lights. Nearly two hundred patients had to be evacuated and transported – none of whom suffered injury.
It was the best outcome leadership could have hoped for, according to CIO Joe Diver.
Joe Diver
“You always have a plan, but to actually execute it and do it flawlessly, that says a lot about the team,” he noted. “If there’s a poster child for emergency operations management, it’s Signature Health.”
In fact, that resilience was a key factor in his decision to join the team in March 2024 – along with the fact that he grew up in Brockton, which made it feel like “coming home.” During a recent interview with This Week Health, Diver described the experience of guiding the IT organization through the transition and helping to position it for future success.
Although there’s never an ideal time for a catastrophic event, the fire at Brockton Hospital proved particularly challenging for the IT team, as it happened one month before a scheduled go-live of Meditech Expanse 2.2.
Those plans, of course, took a backseat as the organization shifted its focus to care continuity. Within a month, two urgent care facilities were opened to take on patients, and a few weeks later, 25 medical services had been relocated to other Signature Healthcare locations.
For the next 18 months, Signature was immersed in the rebuilding process, which included rewiring the hospital – which Brian Backoff, Director of Facilities and Engineering described as a “monumental task” – along with improving the infrastructure, renovating the ED, and opening both a new outpatient surgical center and a 12-unit behavioral health triage unit.
As this was happening, Diver’s team was focused on supporting the latest version of Expanse, and training users on new workflows. “The workflow changed completely,” he recalled, adding that Signature trained more than 450 physicians and nurses using MedPower’s online training module, which worked well. “Nobody missed a beat. Everyone was well trained and ready to go.”
One factor that undoubtedly played a role was the successful transition initiated by then-CIO Nick Szymanski. In addition to getting up to speed on the key stakeholders, that meant “understanding the past and the future to know what gaps needed to be filled, what plans had to be further developed, and how to execute on those,” Diver said.
And not just execute, but do it while staying within the budget, which was especially difficult given the fact that Signature Brockton’s doors had been closed for months. This is where vendor partnerships proved pivotal in helping to reduce expenses. “We weren’t using the applications or systems, and so we came to an agreement as to how we could massage those terms and contracts,” he noted. “We did a lot of work to make sure we were in good shape.”
Additionally, his team was able to take advantage of the facility’s closure to update the infrastructure and WiFi access points much more quickly. As a result, when the doors opened in August 2024, “the beds were filled quickly and the ED was jam-packed again,” he said. “Everything was going in the right direction because of the work we did.”
All of that groundwork helped set the stage for the work Signature is doing in the AI realm. One use case involves leveraging analytics to predict missed appointments. Through an algorithm developed by Meditech, users can plug in information that is then matched with historical data to determine whether the patient is a high risk for no-show, and if that’s the case, opt for a virtual visit.
Another area ripe for AI technology is throughput logistics, according to Diver. The idea is to help users more effectively identify patients who are clinically stable and ready to transition from hospital to home, which can boost satisfaction, and potentially lead to improved outcomes. “We want to manage our patient population as closely as possible,” he added.
And although AI does certainly come with challenges – and should be approached through a lens of risk management – it’s a leap that community hospitals must be willing to take, said Diver. Fortunately, trails have already been blazed by larger organizations with more resources, and by “watching what they’re doing and following in their footsteps,” leaders can avoid making costly mistakes and stay focused on their core objectives.
“AI tools have to have a crisp, clear focus on what the ROI is and how we measure and monitor that,” he noted, adding that long-term deals are off the table. “We can’t make a five-year bet on anything. It’s challenging even to make a three-year bet because of the changes in the industry as well as technology itself.”
What CIOs need, Diver added, is “a mutually beneficial ROI that we can measure for the first 6-12 months. If the vendor is hitting that out of the park in collaboration with us, they're going to get the second year or third year, without a doubt. But you can’t be stuck in a three-year term and not get a return. You can’t throw good money after bad.”
It’s a far cry from what the CIO role looked like 10 or even 5 years ago, according to Diver, who has fully embraced that evolution. Rather than being tasked primarily with keeping the lights on, today’s leader is “a strategic partner who is engaged in planning,” he said, and is willing to question why things are being done in a certain way – and listen to the responses.
In fact, he believes CIOs shouldn’t lead the IT strategy, but instead, should help formulate it based on feedback from others. “It’s not about leading with technology. It’s leading with an innovative mindset” and creating a culture of collaboration, he said. “That’s what keeps me excited.”
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