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A Hospital Along the Mississippi
In 1891 a Norwegian doctor named Adolf Gundersen arrived in La Crosse, a rough timber town along the bluffs of the Mississippi River, across from Minnesota and upriver from Iowa. He planned to stay only long enough to pay off his medical school debts and return to Norway. He ended up never leaving. Gundersen opened a small second-story clinic that grew into a large group practice located next to Lutheran Hospital, the second in the city, which opened in 1902. Many of Gundersen's sons and grandsons went into medicine as well, and the clinic worked closely with the hospital, eventually merging into Gundersen Lutheran Inc. in 1995.
Today, Gundersen Lutheran is a nonprofit health care network, with a 325-bed teaching hospital, a staff of 500 physicians and 38 satellite clinics in three states, which handled 1.2 million outpatient visits last year.
Lathrop joined the hospital as a resident in 1970. He developed an interest in technology long before personal computers started appearing in the hospital. "I had this crazy thing about computers," he says. "I was fascinated by them. I wrote code."
Eventually, the hospital hired a director of information systems. But Lathrop discovered that the new director wasn't terribly concerned about the hospital's core business of serving patients or its chief stakeholders, the staff. "He wasn't very interested in how to help doctors," Lathrop says. "He had his own plan, and it didn't include the people who were working here."
Enter Deb Rislow, who arrived at Gundersen in 1989 as a systems analyst. Rislow grew up surrounded by technology: Her father was an Air Force radio expert who built computers from kits at home with his daughter. Rislow went to nursing school and was a nurse for eight years before getting a degree in computer science, convinced that technology had the potential to revolutionize health care.
Her first technology job was as a systems analyst at a hospital in Arizona. When Gundersen chose the same vendor for a similar project, Rislow joined the staff. She eventually became the director of information systems and, two years ago, became the hospital's first CIO. "I thought, 'There will be a point at which nurses and computers will merge,'" she recalls. "Everything was done totally manually. When you saw the inefficiencies, it was clear things would change."
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