Mike Smith, Lee Memorial Health System, with Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick at IBM Edge 2014 @thecube bmedge Lee Memorial Health Systems is one of many healthcare providers around the country implementing electronic medical health records. As the largest healthcare provider in southwest Florida, Lee Memorial Health Systems owns all the hospitals in that area, and also handles long term care, home health, and physician offices. Mike Smith, CIO of Lee Memorial, stopped by theCUBE at IBM Edge to talk about how the Informatics and IT Department helps the company provide a smooth “continuum of care coverage” for medical patients in southern Florida. Changes in the Healthcare IT Structure To provide IT for four hospitals, Lee Memorial runs all their infra-patient technology out of one central location, also their backup center. This centralization, Smith says, is a structure that’s useful to “deliver integrated care to every community.” Delivering more coordinated care is one of Lee Memorial’s many goals, and one that they intend to use information technology to handle. ‘ Alterations in personnel roles Implementing electronic medical records involves a lot of input from medical professionals, which is Lee Memorial has “something in the neighborhood of 35 nurses on the informatics staff,” in addition to physicians and pharmacists. Other business staffing structures have also adapted to the changes at Lee Memorial — the chief data officer role, for example, is fulfilled by “a combination of individuals. We had clinical disciplines around the data, financial disciplines around the data, so we really have several domains that are handled by different individuals and the data officer role is really shared.” What’s spurred many of these changes, Smith said in conversation with Dave Vellante, is the Affordable Care Act. Aspects of the new law, like the funding attached to “meaningful use effort,” mean that Lee Memorial has been able to accelerate its goal