Healthcare IT Game Changers to Watch: Vangent’s Kerry Weems

Present: Senior Vice President and General Manager, Health Solutions, Vangent

Career highlights: The majority of Weems’ 28 years of government service was spent in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where he began as a junior budget analyst with the Social Security Administration (then, part of HHS) and ending his career leading the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Other positions included Deputy Assistant Secretary for HHS’s Budget (the largest budget in government), and serving as chief financial officer through several audit cycles. In that capacity, completed a financial management system implementation, which unified HHS (with the exception of CMS) under an Oracle platform.

Personal: “It’s always hard being a Dallas Cowboys fan in the Washington, DC area,” says Weems, a New Mexico native. “The other odd fact is my undergraduate degree is in philosophy; not too many people end up in senior positions in government and business with that degree.”

TIPS

• Get the sociology right. “When it comes to health IT, in a lot of ways the technology is easy but the sociology hard,” says Weems. “Approaching an EHR or HIE project as a purely technological project can sow the seeds of failure. States are trying to think through how they should govern in HIT. They’re thinking through their responsibilities for privacy. So, you need to remember the sociology to help build the institutions required for a successful project.”

• Remember the end goal. “The end goal of electronic health records isn’t to create a technological solution,” says Weems. “The end goal is to improve healthcare and to lower costs. That’s the bottom line of what we really need from electronic health records.”

• Stay actively involved. “As a leader, you can’t just preside over your project; you have to be actively involved with the project and your customer. At least during the period of the engagement make sure you are a successful participant in the business case and in the governance of the project. You also need good on-the-ground intelligence. You need to work with people whom you trust to give you the good news and the bad.”

FULL INTERVIEW

ExecutiveBiz: You spent 28 years in government addressing healthcare issues. How does it look from the private sector side?

Kerry Weems: While some things look different, the thing that strikes me is how much the challenges look the same. The government is just now figuring out how to spend the IT stimulus bill it passed this past year, and the private sector is figuring out how to make the most of it. I don’t see anything surprising or different there. Things may look a little different after Congress finishes up with healthcare reform but we’ll have to see. That may look more or less the same.

ExecutiveBiz: In government, you served under Democratic and Republican administrations. How does that background inform your current role at Vangent?

Kerry Weems: The thing that’s expected of a career employee, and I was a career employee, is what’s called “neutral competence.” That is, when you’re reporting to a political official they may want to hear their particular side. It’s your duty, as a career employee, to be neutral in that regard and give them the facts as you see them. Growing up in that world, especially in the budget world, where it is fact-filled but also a budget document is one of the most political documents in government, that is an intellectual discipline that I think has helped me considerably in the healthcare world. I can look at things fairly dispassionately without regard to political alliance and have a firm, well-informed opinion about it.

ExecutiveBiz: The outcome of healthcare reform remains uncertain. Where are you placing your bets?

Kerry Weems: I think this will be the buying year … the year that practices begin acquiring, especially ambulatory electronic health record (EHR), and installing them. As we go through the year I expect that pace to pick up considerably. The year will also oversee a lot of business and experimentation with health information exchanges. You can see states starting to put solicitations on the street for those things now. There will be a lot of work in that area and, I predict, some spectacular successes and some spectacular failures.

ExecutiveBiz: What role will open source play in moving healthcare legacy systems forward?

Kerry Weems: Open source is certainly a strategy that can be employed both for new and legacy systems. Likely some sort of open source, either middleware or connection, will be required for legacy EHRs that may, for instance, not meet current interoperability requirements. Vangent has the ability to make that connection in the open source world. I do expect, as people look at their legacy environments they will leverage some sort of open source solution to achieve interoperability so they don’t have to rip and replace.

ExecutiveBiz: You’ve stated: “When it comes to health IT, in a lot of ways the technology is easy but the sociology hard.” How do you plan to navigate the sociology of healthcare IT?

Kerry Weems: In some cases, you can see states saying, “Tell us how we can have a sustainable business model.”  The question they’re not asking — and that Vangent is making sure to ask and have an answer for — is, “So, we have a business model, what’s the governance model? Who’s going to be at the table to govern this and how will it be governed?” We’ll help customers answer that question this year. You can also expect us to continue on our pathway of helping government customers lower costs with a higher quality of care.

Posted by Lisa Singh on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010. Filed under Healthcare IT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry