Dianne Mandernach: A Shared Platform
As SISU Medical System’s CEO, Dianne Mandernach brings hospitals together to modernize information technology while saving money.
By Lisa Zamosky | Print the pdf of this story
In the late 1990s, Dianne Mandernach was the CEO of 25-bed Mercy Hospital & Health Care Center in rural Moose Lake, Minn.—and the world was getting ready for the Y2K conversion. It was up to Mandernach to find a way to modernize her operations while offsetting the costs that made doing so prohibitive.
Fortunately, Mercy Hospital was not alone. Many other small hospitals in northern Minnesota were facing the same dilemma and looking for creative solutions. The rest, as they say, is history. SISU Medical Systems, a consortium of medical centers that shares IT resources, was formed. And Mandernach, who also served as Minnesota’s Health Commissioner, assumed the helm as SISU’s CEO.
“It was from the get-go an issue of sharing costs,” Mandernach says. “We could go into a new computer platform software product and have a little bit more of a critical mass by working together. We had better negotiating power in terms of that contractual relationship, so there was cost savings.”
The consortium also gave Mercy Hospital and its partners the ability to hire professionals with the expertise to support the system. Mandernach says that’s something each hospital likely would not have been able to afford individually.
In just its first decade, SISU has grown from a collaborative with seven hospitals to 16. It now is the largest health-related technology company in the region. “That’s significant growth when you understand that you are bringing an organization into the world of e-health from top to bottom.”
The collaborative is built around shared software and IT staff, a data center, and clinical support. Coming together made good sense for a group of small, rural hospitals that would have been hard-pressed independently to afford the IT platforms currently supporting their businesses. “We’re smaller entities, which is the group that probably struggles the most with accessing capital in today’s world,” Mandernach says. “The other aspect is that you need to mitigate the impact of your expenses, and if you can find ways to share and still compete, that’s what you want to do.”
One key element to SISU’s success is the staff. “We have been very thoughtful in the staff that has joined SISU,” Mandernach says. “We look for people who have hospital experience, not just technical experience, because we believe that to really provide the value and support for our members, our expertise needs to also reside in an understanding of the world that these people work in.”
SISU’s analysts and programmers include former nurses and people with lab and radiology experience. The partnership has enabled SISU’s 16 rural hospitals to modernize their businesses while saving each participating provider organization significant amounts of money, something that’s increasingly important in today’s economic environment. “Every single entity in health care is talking about reducing costs and maintaining the rate of increase,” Mandernach says. “Cost has become a huge, huge issue in health care.”
Although she acknowledges that there is no magic bullet for saving money and weathering these tough economic times, Mandernach says partnering should always be a consideration. “In the toolbox has to be the issue of partnering in a noncompetitive model that allows for cost to come out of the system.”
