Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/479065
62 Leadership & Management I n December 2014, Phyllis Teater, CIO of The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus, saw the fruits of many years of labor come to pass when one of its HIMSS Analyt- ics Stage 7 hospitals moved to a new home. The Ohio State University Comprehensive Can- cer Center–Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute moved to a newly built 1.1 million-square-foot hospital with 306 inpatient beds on 21 floors, now known as the "New James." For Ms. Teater — who has served as CIO since 2010 — helping to launch a massive, advanced new hospital meant overseeing state-of-the-art technology — a lot of it. Here, Ms. Teater discusses her role in the go-live and the lessons she learned along the way. Note: Interview has been edited for length and clarity. Question: As CIO of OSU Wexner Medical Center, what are some of the specific re- sponsibilities you had regarding the New James' health IT go-live? Phyllis Teater: I oversee a large IT department of about 350 people. We do all the traditional IT ser- vices from the network all the way through PCs, mobile devices and the EMR system. We provide the computing services for the healthcare delivery organizations and the college of medicine at Ohio State. As the CIO, I've been involved in this project since the folks in IT started designing the network in- frastructure — which was before construction even began — all the way up through Dec. 14, when all of the patients were moved into the new building and we began supporting the produc- tion environment. There are hundreds of systems supporting this building and we broke them up into two categories. The first category included systems already in use that were going to be ex- tended to be available in this new building, such as the EMRs and the hospital admitting system. The second category included systems that were going to be used in this building for the very first time, and then extended back into our older buildings. We wanted to have uniform processes across our hospitals. During the live, we were there 24/7, supporting all the technology includ- ing the new PCs, printers, surgical systems, robot- ics, phones and more. All of the technology that went into that hospital is running on our network and was deployed by our folks to get hooked up to the hospital. The Tests and Triumphs of Building a Hospital in the Age of Health IT Q&A With OSU Wexner Medical Center CIO Phyllis Teater By Shannon Barnet