Michael Garcia has served as CIO of Miami, Florida-based Jackson Health System since 2012. But before that, he held various other positions at the system, including corporate director of information technology. Garcia has also worked at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
Jackson Health System has been busy in the IT realm as of late.
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In June, it signed an 11-year agreement with tech company Philips for Enterprise Monitoring as a Service.
The next month, it extended its partnership with CarePort Health, which provides care management and post-acute outcomes and was acquired by Allscripts in 2016. Jackson now utilizes CarePort’s discharge planning and referral management platforms. Additionally, Jackson and CarePort created an integration solution between the health system’s Cerner EHR and the CarePort Care Management platform.
In a phone interview, Garcia elaborated on these announcements, voiced his thoughts on interoperability and made a prediction about health IT in 2019.
This exchange has been lightly edited.
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MedCity: As a public health system based in Miami, what are some of Jackson’s biggest challenges and focus areas?
Garcia: We’re the safety net hospital and are governed by the Public Health Trust. Being the safety net for Miami-Dade County, there are many challenges. One of the biggest is the unfunded care population that we serve. We’re trying to overcome everything that’s going on with … reimbursement in healthcare. We feel we have a common mission: The healthier we make our community, the less the cost of care is going to be for us.
MedCity: Do you believe the healthcare industry is making progress on the interoperability front?
Garcia: If you go to the HIMSS conference, grab a stone and throw it up in the air, you’ll probably hit an interoperability sign. Folks call it integration, interoperability or exchanging information. There are many different definitions.
The more we’re able to integrate our IT for the experience to be seamless, the better. That’s what we’re trying to accomplish.
MedCity: How is M&A activity in the health IT space impacting Jackson?
Garcia: From an EHR perspective as it pertains to what users are using, there are two big players: Cerner and Epic. IDX, GE and Philips have all really moved out of the EHR space. They saw it was taken over by these two major players.
[Cerner and Epic] have really different philosophies. Cerner grew by buying modules and integrating them into their platform. Epic was more about building tools and integrating from within.
Integration is key when the capabilities are there. Where we’re seeing a lot of movement is as it pertains to HIEs. It’s also about how the consumer is getting in between and being able to own their record.
MedCity: This summer, Jackson announced its recent work with CarePort Health. What initiated those efforts?
Garcia: We always had both [CarePort and Cerner]. The key was they were not integrated solutions.
There was no reason to forklift the working solution just because Cerner didn’t partner with Allscripts and CarePort at that time. We said, “How can we do things differently?”
Now, when you’re in our Cerner EHR and you have to do discharge planning or a referral to an external organization, we’re able to do that integrated within the technologies.
MedCity: What prompted the agreement with Philips for Enterprise Monitoring as a Service, and what does Jackson hope to gain from it?
Garcia: Once again, going to the cost — it’s a lot easier to predict your cost when something is based on utilization. We’ve been using the Philips IntelliSpace solution. As we perform diagnostic studies on patients, we pay based on volume. We wanted to do a similar model when it came to our monitoring.
As we were looking at SaaS models, we asked, “How come that’s not being used in the monitoring space?” That’s when we got together with Philips and did monitoring as a service. That kind of model helps us out because it’s based on utilization, not the assumption of what we think we might be utilizing.
MedCity: What are your predictions for the health IT sector in 2019?
Garcia: When it comes to the use of technology, it continues to grow and dependency on technology continues to grow. Successes and failures will be measured by implementations and how they’re done.
You can’t shove technology down users’ throats. It’s about how to manage the change. Change is a constant now, and we’re implementing solutions all day long. How you plan for downtime and account for change in your organization is so key to survival.
In 2019, there is only going to continue to be more dependencies on technology. Planning for change is going to be key for many organizations.
Photo: chombosan, Getty Images
