Healthcare Informatics: One-On-One with CEO Jason Mabry

In the June 2017 issue of Healthcare Informatics, Optimum Healthcare IT CEO Jason Mabry discusses Optimum’s core mission, what differentiates the company from the competition, and the company’s strengths.

The business of healthcare is nothing if not dynamic—and it can be difficult for hospitals and other healthcare organizations to prioritize an already long list of critical information technology (IT) projects, something Jason Mabry, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Optimum Healthcare IT®, understands. He talks with Healthcare Informatics about why having the right advisors on hand can help healthcare organizations best approach their IT, application support and change management needs, making all the difference in meeting your business goals while improving quality of care.

HCI: Tell me more about Optimum Healthcare IT’s core mission.

Jason Mabry: Improving patient care through technology. That’s the heart of what we do—and that’s why so many people on our team are clinicians, first and foremost. We want to go beyond just fulfilling our clients’ needs by providing world-class customer service and strategic solutions to help our clients achieve their mission. We invest in developing the necessary proprietary tools. At the end of the day—when you focus on that ultimate goal of quality care, the rest falls into place.

HCI: What differentiates you from your competitors?

Jason Mabry: It’s our team. Our people. Our staff consultants, tools and our leaders. We do more than perform the traditional things well. More than fulfill the tactical needs and requests of our clients. There’s still enough room in this space to make a living playing follow the leader, but that’s not who we are; not who we want to be. We’re here to advance the industry.

Optimum does a lot of things very well, ranging from implementation to training to optimization. But the real difference comes down to our people. We consider ourselves to be in the people business, and that is why we’ve invested so heavily in hiring people who have sat on the other side of the desk. They’ve lived the life of our clients and understand the challenges they deal with on a daily basis. They have the expertise and knowledge to be able to think two or three years downstream and understand what our clients need to prepare for the next wave of change in the industry. And that really does give us an edge.

HCI: Your strengths are in Advisory and Managed Services. Why are they so important?

Jason Mabry: Our managed services department was formed about two years ago. We see that clients are finally coming to the conclusion that implementation was the easy part. Now they have to support those technologies. That ongoing support piece can be quite challenging and expensive—more so than many organizations may have anticipated. We see that there is a lot more to just a managed services offering then just the supporting staff. We see where we can help better manage processes and workflows to optimize those technologies. We believe that EHR support is more of a science than an art. So the discipline in process, governance, distribution of labor, capacity planning, etc. are equally as important as the quality of the staff. Optimum Healthcare IT has a whole methodology around process, governance, distribution of labor, security, and capacity planning. Every aspect, really, of technology support. And it’s something that can be done better and cheaper than most organizations realize.

For an EHR implementation, we offer advisory services across the entire lifecycle that includes system selection, planning, and capital budgeting, establishing governance and a Program Management Office, critical decision making, design, build, testing, training, activation and post go-live optimization. We also offer this for various scenarios of implementation including a traditional go live to Community Connect. Beyond EHRs, we offer services that support ERP implementations, connectivity and third party systems,
system integration across all the technology solutions, data storage and usage, analytics and even building an efficient and relevant IT service management infrastructure.

Let’s face it; margins are shrinking and yet healthcare organizations are being asked to do more and more with regards to improving patient care. At the end of the day, both our managed services and advisory capacities are there to help these organizations increase their quality while lowering their costs. We work with them to help them stretch each healthcare dollar as far as they can without sacrificing patient care. As I said, our mission always comes back to improving patient care through technology

HCI: What is the most important thing that hospital Chief Information Officers (CIOs) should know about Optimum Healthcare IT?

Jason Mabry: Everything we have, we earned. Our organization is all about building trust and serving our clients. We were fortunate enough to be awarded 2017 overall best in KLAS for IT services, and we’re very proud of that as it is a direct reflection of feedback from our clients. Once a client engages with us, for a small or big project, they tend to come back to us over and over again. That’s something we pride ourselves on.

Optimum Healthcare IT was recently ranked #73 on the Healthcare Informatics Top 100 list. Read the press release here.