Cross systems
Vendrig came to the role after nearly five years as CIO of the Auckland District Health Board -- one of the owners of healthAlliance. But his involvement in IT leadership roles in health began more than 15 years ago, in his native Netherlands, where he also completed a paper on health information systems at the University of Maastricht.
At EDS (now part of HP), he was manager for health accounts in Auckland and Wellington. He managed the outsourcing arrangement with Capital Coast Health when it outsourced its IT to EDS, now part of HP. "I have learned a lot from managing that relationship, what worked, what didn't work."
He joined the Auckland District Health Board as IS alignment manager, and eventually becoming its CIO. He says his experiences at the DHBs provided him "a very good understanding of the challenges we are facing".
When he was Auckland DHB CIO, he was asked to lead the team investigating and addressing the complaints from doctors and patients when Labtests took over from Medlab as the main provider of community pathology services in the Auckland Region.
The Quality and Safety Turnaround Assurance Team reported to the chairpersons and CEOs of the three DHBs in the Auckland region. These interactions proved useful in his current role -- where he has to interact with four boards. "The main learning out of that was, how to deal with this very complex governance structure and quite often in high pressure high risk issues?"
He appreciates having a leadership group that understands the goal of the organisation "is not about IT, it is about delivering better services to patients. And IT enables that."
Vendrig is emphatic about having his team's continuous interaction with the clinicians, ensuring they have clinical sponsor for their projects. It is important for the IT team not to "get too distant from the reality of doctor patient encounters", he says. They invite clinicians to give briefings, in order to bring a "more clinical culture into our teams".
He is also seeing a move towards clinicians and patients collaborating around a central place, in a Web 2.0 environment. He says there are huge challenges, however, in this shift. "It comes back to how can we keep systems safe and reliable? How can we share information in a sensible, safe and secure way? Who can access [the] information?"
He says that instead of large scale investments in that space, healthAlliance is looking for smaller scale projects working with a small number of strategic health IT partners.
Cross department and cross agency collaboration is also important for planning, research, education and business support functions. He says an incremental approach is preferred in this area and there is a real concern around long-term licensing arrangements. He says open source can provide alternative licensing mechanisms. "The scale of licensing is a real challenge," he says. "I am happy to look at hosted or as a service type options. Cloud service offerings are becoming more relevant to the sector every day; I do not have to manage or host it all myself."
More important is having the business enablement team skill set that understands the technology. "Effective collaboration doesn't happen automatically," he says. "Everybody says it is easy to set up a wiki and everybody will use it. It is the making it work that is really the challenge."
He says an "incremental approach" would be to build a "business enablement team that will work with departments and make it work with them".
He says at the moment, they are using some software as a service, such as the Moodle online learning environment. "There is an awful lot of potential for both clinical and administrative collaboration solutions and," he says. "We can do a lot more; there is a lot more users out there that would love us to do more in this space."
Open conversations
Having worked on both the demand and supply side of IT services, Vendrig has a strategy for vendor management other CIOs can adopt. "That background, that understanding is very powerful to have now as well because you can have those open conversations with your suppliers," he says. "Every year, I take my business plan and publish it to all my contacts in the supplier market." The underlying message is this: "If you want to talk to me about something, this is what we are up to. If you can help me with this, then please talk to me. If you can't, please stay away because it will be just a waste of time."
If he does get a cold call, he says, he just sends that information. "Have a look at this," he would say. "If you can highlight a couple of paragraphs on how you can make a difference to me, then let us talk."
Vendrig unwinds by fishing, running and mountain biking. These activities, he says, are "family time" for him and a way to stay fit. He loves to travel and spent four weeks in Nepal with his Kiwi wife last November. "No phones, no electricity, just hiking," he says, smiling. "It is refreshing to have a complete break now and then."
Divina Paredes is editor of CIO New Zealand. Follow her on Twitter @divinap and @cio_nz.
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