Technology and transformation at Marshfield Clinic Health System, a conversation with CIO Jeri Koester

Marshfield Clinical Health recently chose Infor CloudSuite Healthcare to support its growth and mission. CIO Jeri Koester, recognized in Becker’s Healthcare Women to Watch in Health IT in 2020, discusses Marshfield’s technology future.

Q: What is your role at Marshfield, and how did you get here?

I am not new to Marshfield – I have been here for over a decade. After spending time in other industries, I was drawn to Marshfield and its mission. I started as a senior project manager and programmer analyst, then moved up to be the Director of Business Operation, then Vice President of Business Management. Last year I became CIO, responsible for the long-term alignment of technology with our organization’s strategic goals.

Q: Who is Marshfield Clinic Health System?

A: Marshfield Clinic Health System is the largest private group medical practice in Wisconsin, and one of the largest in the United States. We are located throughout Wisconsin and our system includes hospitals, clinics, health plan, and one of the largest private medical research institutes in Wisconsin.

Across all of these, our singular mission is to enrich lives. A strong IT system is a big part of that mission so it’s important to ensure we are always at the forefront of healthcare technology to not only support operations and staff but, ultimately, patient care.

Q: What are some of your business challenges that led to your decision to move to Infor CloudSuite for Healthcare?

A: Marshfield started out as a charitable organization in 1916, with six physicians. And now here we are with more than 1,200 medical providers representing 90 specialties and subspecialties.

Frankly, our old system just could not support growth. We had far too many manual processes. The system itself has stability issues, which led to significant downtimes and lots of ad hoc system patches. That was not only inefficient but included unacceptable risks across the organization.

Q: What are your expectations for this project?

A: Our expectations are to implement the “60-30-10” approach using Infor’s guidance for workflows. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel. For those not familiar, the 60-30-10 approach means we can use 60 percent of the core functionality out of the box, 30 percent of Infor CloudSuite functionality can be configured by fine-tuning the standard, preconfigured options. That final 10 percent allows us to enable unique configurations using Infor extensibility.

Q: What are your anticipated benefits?

A. We trust Infor will help us achieve our key performance indicators because of their maturity in the market and experience in healthcare. With full automation, we will gain efficiencies, improve charge capture, enhance the user experience with a simplified interface, and improve, overall, our entire IT infrastructure.

With all of that in place, we can support caregivers to do what they do best. That means fulfilling our Marshfield Clinic Health System’s stated vow to patients: to simplify the path to healthcare, delivered where, when, and how they want it.

I’d like to thank Jeri for taking the time to share her insights about Marshfield Clinic Health System’s technology strategy. If your organization is experiencing similar challenges and limitations described in this discussion I invite you to read this guide to learn five ways hospitals and health systems can align and integrate their operational and clinical infrastructures to create a fully connected healthcare operations platform.

Tim Brown, Infor Healthcare Customer Officer