Gene Scheurer, CEO, Optimum Healthcare IT
Gene Scheurer, CEO of Optimum Healthcare IT, spoke with Invest about the company’s main highlights in the last year, trends in the healthcare IT sector, electronic medical record implementations, Epic practices, standing out from competitors, changes in patient experience over the years, and addressing challenges in their sector.
Reflecting on the past year, what have been the main highlights and key milestones for Optimum Healthcare?
Optimum Healthcare is a full-service healthcare IT advisory and consulting company. Our business is primarily focused on providers. Within our business, we have a few main pillars. One is electronic medical record implementations. We do everything from owning the entire project at a healthcare system to doing advisory, pre-implementation advisory, implementation itself, training, and go-live. We also do post-implementation optimization. That’s one major piece of the business, and it’s what Optimum was founded on. Over the years, we’ve added additional ancillary service lines, which are within our digital transformation solution set. We’re the only elite ServiceNow partner within healthcare. We’re also an AWS-certified partner, a Microsoft-certified partner, and a Workday-certified partner. Those are really bolt-ons into the core electronic medical record business.
Over the last year, we’ve won some major implementations solely owned by us. Those are key for us to continue our growth within the industry. There’s an entity out there called KLAS, which is the consumer reports of healthcare and the healthcare industry, technology, and so forth. We are number one in KLAS in the go-live category. We’ve also been able to win a lot of cloud migration. Taking Epic to the cloud, we’ve been able to stand up and do some of the country’s first Epic to the cloud migrations. This year has been really good. All of our service lines are experiencing growth from last year.
The last pillar that we have is called Optimum CareerPath. Essentially, we take highly vetted college graduates or individuals with one to two years of experience, and we partnered with a group called CHIME, an organization for chief information officers within the healthcare landscape. They put together a specific curriculum to get a healthcare IT certificate, if you will. It’s basically a master’s degree program. The benefit is that there is currently no degree in healthcare IT if you think about healthcare and healthcare IT. You may major in healthcare or information technology, but there are no courses out there that combine the two. We developed a program that puts participants through a six-week master’s degree program to get them well-versed in workflows within the hospital system. The program teaches them healthcare IT and how it all intersects. If the individual passes, we put them on another six-week track to get them either Epic-certified, Workday-certified, or ServiceNow-certified.
Give us an overview of the healthcare industry in Jacksonville and Northeast Florida. Are there any trends that we should be aware of?
When electronic medical records were introduced in the early 2000s, there was a high level of adoption for those systems being implemented. What you see now is a lot of pressure on the healthcare system for ROI and cost reductions. Obviously, COVID had a huge impact on that, hurting their revenue streams for elective surgeries and so forth. The healthcare systems have been unable to return to where they were pre-COVID. There’s a high focus on efficiencies within the healthcare system. You are seeing more consolidation in which software healthcare systems utilize their electronic medical record. You’re seeing consolidation in terms of application rationalization. If you look at a healthcare system, they have thousands of applications that they have bought over the years. Also, within healthcare, you must retain that data for regulatory compliance.
Which services do you expect to be the main drivers of growth for your company over the next 12 months?
I think it’s twofold. In our Epic practice, we’re starting to see many healthcare systems move away from other software vendors to Epic. Epic has become the best-in-class for electronic medical records. You are also seeing healthcare systems that implemented Epic maybe five or ten years ago because of the efficiencies that they’re trying to gain. Now, from the early days of those Epic implementations, Epic has evolved to create other modules and analytics as technology has come to bear.
The challenge is that if you installed Epic five or ten years ago, you probably customized the application so much that it can’t take upgrades. You’re starting to see organizations that implemented Epic in the past do what they call a reset project, which is basically getting that healthcare system off of the customized version that they’ve created into more standardized Epic software. The software could then be upgraded to add the new bells and whistles Epic adds to their ecosystem.
What makes Optimum Healthcare IT stand out and differentiate itself from other competitors in the healthcare IT industry?
The healthcare IT industry is competitive. Like any other industry, there are a lot of good firms out there, and they all have healthcare practices. We compete with the big boys but also partner with them when it makes sense for our clients. Attracting and retaining top talent helps us differentiate ourselves. Healthcare is also nuanced and specific. It’s hard for somebody to come into healthcare because of all the terminologies and the workflows. We always hire individuals who have healthcare IT experience. That’s been a big part of our strategic plan to grow and deliver for our clients. We are always looking for individuals with that experience but also have the right work ethic and culture within Optimum.
Although we’re a larger company, we still want to make sure that you get the right people buying into what we believe is the right way in terms of customer service, how you treat each other, and going above and beyond. That’s a big thing for us. It separates us from a lot of the competition.
How has the patient experience evolved in the past few years, and what changes do you anticipate healthcare providers will be making in the future?
The access to doctors has evolved. Virtual care has really taken off again because of COVID. If any good thing came out of COVID, it was more innovation around how people are treated. Virtual care visits have become a normal thing. If you have a parent who lives by themselves, you can look at their healthcare records and see if they are taking their prescriptions, refilling them on time, getting to their doctor’s appointments, and what information the doctor gave them for care at home. More information in the hands of individuals helps those people help themselves in terms of care. If you can do some proactive things, a lot of new applications are out there on population and health management. You’re going to see that trend and then analytics as well. You have the ability to drive a lot of data on a particular individual, and there’s enough information out there that can start doing trend analysis for other patients who have had success with certain treatments.
With the combination of access to information for the patient themselves, plus the analytics that are starting to take hold in AI, generative AI, you’re going to see healthcare take that next step in terms of patient care, patient safety, and ultimately, the health of individuals within those communities.
What are some of the unique challenges facing the healthcare sector in Northeast Florida, and how is Optimum Healthcare IT working to address these challenges?
Talent is a big part of ensuring that healthcare providers can implement and adopt these new technologies. For Optimum, we like to talk to the CIOs themselves. We hold many sessions where we bring in thought leaders and try to get an idea of what’s keeping them up at night and where they see things going. We try to stay ahead of that as much as possible. We put in different solutions that we hear from our customers that are either challenges today or will be challenges tomorrow.
I also go back to the CareerPath model, where you have an aging population in areas where people are starting to retire, and they have a lot of information and experience. There has to be an inflow of talent to backfill those individuals. That’s where we see that CareerPath model as being strategic for our customers because we can look at it on a two or three-year plan to say here’s all your initiatives, your roadmap over the next two to three years. Here’s where you have talent gaps, or here’s where you anticipate certain people retiring within your healthcare system. Let’s start building up that staffing plan and start pulling in individuals who you can start training today, who can ultimately backfill those individuals who are going to be leaving the workforce.
That’s how we look at the world at Optimum. We always say that the answers to our customers’ issues are not in the four walls of Optimum. They’re outside the four walls. You have to talk to the individuals who are living and breathing it every day. That’s typically the CIOs, the CMIOs, the CEOs, and the CFOs. That’s where the answers are in terms of their challenges, and then we try to stay close to that as much as possible.
