Medical centre CIO uses strong dose of guilt to ensure vendor due diligence

It can't hurt to inflict a little guilt on vendor reps to make sure they install technology properly and keep it running when needed, as Walter Fahey, CIO at a New York medical centre has discovered.
8/20/2009 5:00:00 AM By: Matt Hamblen

A CIO might receive an MBA to master the finer points of IT management, but one tactic not learned in business school, inflicting guilt on vendor reps to make sure their technology functions reliably, can be effective, too.

Ask Walter Fahey, the CIO at Maimonides Medical Center in New York. The 705-bed facility has undergone major network upgrades in recent months, using the services of longtime vendor Verizon Communications and its new Connected HealthCare Solutions group.

The network upgrades are designed to support electronic health records software that's being upgraded in coming months and the transmission of patient data to smartphones and other wireless devices used by doctors, he said.

In an interview, Fahey said he frequently brings vendor sales representatives, including those from Verizon, into a Maimonides operating room and delivers a little speech. Fahey explains how complex applications must run reliably on robust networks to provide critical electronic patient information at the proper time to doctors and nurses who are using sophisticated surgical instruments on patients.

"I bring the vendor reps in the operating room and tell them, 'Imagine if one of your relatives were here in surgery. Serious stuff. All this information has to be read, and it's really, really important stuff,' " he said.

Fahey isn't kidding. He said it can't hurt to inflict a little guilt on vendor reps to make sure they install technology properly and keep it running when needed. "Guilt works, because it's logical," he said.

Aside from his frank management style, Fahey has earned a reputation during his 14 years at Maimonides for being thorough and adept at the range of difficult tasks facing IT managers in hospitals. The biggest chore hospital CIOs face lately is wending through the administrative maze associated with recouping federal reimbursements under the stimulus bill for technology investments made by medical centers and doctors in electronic health records technology.

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