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The Casino Network
When Faircloth was hired as CIO, he had six months to get his IT shop up and running. Most of Faircloth's experience was in the banking, resort and casino sectors. His résumé included stints at the Summa Corp., Golden Nugget Inc. and MGM Grand, where he was involved in opening a 5,000-room hotel and casino, the largest in the world.
Although Faircloth was new to the medical industry, he had lived in Las Vegas since 1968, was familiar with the local IT scene and knew how to get things done in the town.
And the institute's connection to the MGM certainly helped. The hotel donated a pile of networking equipment. "I can call the MGM and say, 'We need help,' and they'll lend us someone," Faircloth says.
Faircloth's first move was to look at the plans he had inherited. From the get-go, the institute wanted to implement an EMR system. The original idea was to use a template developed by another cancer institute, which happened to be an inpatient facility instead of an outpatient clinic.
Dr. Robert Comis, president of the Philadelphia-based Coalition of National Cancer Cooperative Groups, notes that EMR technology is still in the early stages, and some deployments have been painful.
"CIOs are essential," he says. "You need a progressive platform for your own institution and interfacing with other systems. EMR penetration is not huge. People have been talking about EMR my whole career. But in the future, an EMR system will become the hub of a whole variety of spokes of information. All institutions grapple with how much they do on their own or how much they want to adapt to take off the shelf. It's a struggle."
That certainly proved true at the Nevada Cancer Institute. Faircloth inherited an IT staff of four, none of whom were that familiar with the selected EMR vendor, IMPAC Medical Systems Inc. Faircloth immediately hired a project manager as well as systems and network experts, picking ex-IMPAC employees for their domain expertise.
"There's not a lot of EMR out there developed for cancer research," says Dr. Manno. "We were looking for a software program that would warehouse all data on our patients so that it could be mined."
The EMR template then needed months of workflow revamping to adopt it to the way the institute does business. "Not many cancer centers have everything in one building," Faircloth says. "We're one stop. We can turn around labs and MRIs in a couple of hours. We have a different philosophy of patient flow. That took six months to get correct."
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