Five Questions With: Dr. Cedric J. Priebe

Cedric J. Priebe, M.D., brings a wealth of IT experience to his new position at Lifespan as senior vice president and CIO.
Cedric J. Priebe, M.D., brings a wealth of IT experience to his new position at Lifespan as senior vice president and CIO.

Dr. Cedric J. Priebe joined Lifespan as senior vice president and chief information officer after serving as CIO for Partners HealthCare – Massachusetts’ largest health care system – and Care New England. He spoke with Providence Business News about key information technology issues affecting the health care industry shortly after coming to Lifespan on Nov. 1.

PBN: You trained as a physician yet chose a technology-based career. Why?
PRIEBE:
During my training as a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital, I gravitated toward health information technology as a tool to help my fellow medical residents and me manage patient information. As young interns, our most challenging tasks were collecting and assimilating the cascade of quantitative and qualitative information generated in caring for our patients and making connections to the growing fund of medical knowledge. Then, the sole IT tools we were given were a beeper, a pen and a key to the medical library, but I viewed the advent of personal computers and networks as opportunities for improvement. I found ways to allocate time for my clinical practice and my work on the hospital’s clinical information systems, and have continued that mix of work since then.

PBN: You come to Lifespan from Partners HealthCare. As Massachusetts’ largest health care system, Partners has significantly more resources – human, technological and fiscal – than does Lifespan. What are the most significant IT lessons you learned or accomplishments you achieved during your tenure at Partners? Can they be applied at Lifespan?
PRIEBE:
When it comes to analytics, the analysts are more important than the technical infrastructure; it’s about their skills and abilities to provide our stakeholders – physicians, nurses and patients – the tools they need. I always say the ‘s’ in IS (information services) is for service, not systems. Lifespan’s IS team of more than 300 employees must focus on delivering a service that satisfies and, if possible, delights our customers. That is a multistep process: Articulate it as a specification, configure or build it, test and remediate it, and then teach our customers how to use it. It doesn’t end there; it’s an ongoing process of refining the service.

PBN: Lifespan recently implemented a new electronic medical records system, LifeChart. What role will you play in building on the implementation of LifeChart? Will LifeChart help propel Lifespan’s transformation toward patient-centered care and, if so, how?
PRIEBE:
Most recently, I was responsible for implementing Partners’ new electronic health record system, an Epic-based EMR system like Lifespan’s LifeChart, at several Partners’ facilities, so I have a thorough knowledge of Epic. At Lifespan, I am responsible for the ‘care and feeding’ of LifeChart. It’s a living, breathing process; it’s not just flipping a switch. LifeChart is now moving from its post-live stabilization phase, where problems and issues with the new system are identified and resolved, to an optimization period where design changes and new features and modules can be implemented now. Our challenge will be prioritizing our initial areas of focus and delivering as many successes as possible with our available time and capacity. Our stakeholders will experience visible, tangible and measurable benefits during the optimization period. For example, I expect the nursing workforce to see clear wins related to clinical documentation, order management and other areas that impact their daily work. This progress has a positive impact on the care we provide our patients.

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PBN: Some physicians are struggling with the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, otherwise known as ‘ICD-10,’ which vastly expanded the number of diagnostic medical codes doctors use to bill government and private insurers. How is Lifespan responding?
PRIEBE:
Lifespan, like all health systems affected by the ICD-10 conversion, needed to prepare both the IT and personnel systems using ICD codes to document and bill for the health care provided. On the IT side, we upgraded software applications to versions compatible with ICD-10 codes, tested those applications and interfaces of messages with ICD-10 codes and remediated any issues discovered. As Lifespan’s LifeChart, which was implemented in March, was already ICD-10 compatible, most of the core applications using ICD-10 were ready for the October conversion. On the personnel front, clinicians and coders – who select ICD-10 codes – needed to be made aware of and educated in using this new, more complex system.

PBN: You plan to maintain a clinical practice as a pediatrician at Hasbro Children’s Hospital. How do you envision juggling roles as a clinician and a C-suite executive?
PRIEBE:
I have worked part time (10 to 20 percent) as a pediatric hospitalist since beginning my health care IT focus. That clinical work, which grounds me in the mission of health care that drives my IT work, allows me to use the IT systems we’ve implemented and experience the support that our IS team provides. I enjoy practicing pediatrics in an academic setting, which offers opportunities to teach and supervise medical students and residents. I look forward to a similar clinical role at Hasbro Children’s Hospital.

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