Rachael Britt-McGraw – Summit Medical Group

The acquisitions add up at Knoxville-based and Tennessee-wide Summit Medical Group, with Chattanooga Family Practice among the recent. Another such operation, this one from Hermitage, is or soon will be in the fold, and with Summit’s agenda calling for at least one new practice each month, there’s little downtime for Chief Information Officer Rachael Britt-McGraw.

Rachael Britt-McGraw | Summit Medical Group | Chief Information Officer

While not speaking about any new or prospective partner in particular, Britt-McGraw says small and modest-sized medical practices seem to have a common denominator, and it does not enable efficiency and cybersecurity in these very wired times. Progressive as these practices might be when it comes to medical services, their back offices haven’t kept pace with the technological curve, and while Britt-McGraw finds that understandable, she says it can’t be business as usual.

“Typically, these operations have one person who does a little bit of everything,” she tells Toggle in June. “They’ll do some IT themselves and outsource the rest, and it’s usually messy and inconsistent.”

But the high-energy Britt-McGraw assures that she and her 30-member infotech department will bring these partners into modern times. Here at Summit, there’s a project manager well-versed in IT, and once a letter of intent is signed, Britt-McGraw and her team assess that firm’s technology, wiring, speed and bandwidth and, once the deal is sealed, typically replace all or most infrastructure. That’s essentially what she did upon joining Summit in January 2021 after honing her skills at another medical practice as well as other companies over the course of a 30-year-plus tech career that’s prepared her for what might be her most consequential role.

”I’ve worked in many different industries—manufacturing, restaurants, healthcare—and it’s given me a backpack full of tools,” she says. “And it has served me well in terms of healthcare.”

Playing catch-up

Britt-McGraw cites several reasons why healthcare has been slow to evolve on the tech front. Physicians  concerns are over their patients and thus they aren’t always the quickest to adopt technology. . It’s expensive enough to run a practice, what with medical school loans to repay, machinery to invest in and high insurance premiums to cover. But around a dozen years ago, the federal government incentivized medical practices to automate to get full reimbursements from Medicaid and Medicare, and that’s had technologists such as Britt-McGraw in much demand.

“All those doctors who were reluctant to give up paper charts had to catapult forward, although many lacked the technology staff to get them there,” she says.

Prior to Britt-McGraw’s arrival, Summit had moved its record-keeping into the Athena system but hadn’t inputted old data. That had the back office paying for it and doctors poring through two systems for patient information.

“Most doctors don’t like having to navigate the clicks in one medical records system, and they had to touch two every day,” she says.

Britt-McGraw was granted a seat at the proverbial table at a most critical time—COVID-19 was in full swing and necessitated much remote work by the non-clinical staff. She made the case for investing in new systems, and early this summer, the last phase of an IT overhaul was consummated to centralize most functions for Summit’s partnering clinics.

The Tennessee-headquartered enterprise IT firm Tenhats oversaw much of the project, overhauling the network and switching and wireless at every site. Britt-McGraw defines the partnership with Tenhats as critical to the success of the huge project to replace infrastructural underpinning. Office 365 and Microsoft have improved internal and external virtual communication, and Britt-McGraw has strengthened the security posture significantly by using an outside partner, Fortified Health Security. Cybersecurity and phishing training is constantly underway—Britt-McGraw emphasizes how the best systems can be compromised by one employee opening a bogus email and clicking on a deceptive hyperlink.

A Knoxville technology company, ServoPlex, was instrumental in upgrading and re-homing all of Summit’s radiology sites’ imaging systems, which they now host.

A refresh program has also commenced, allowing Summit to upgrade technology yearly rather than depending upon it until it’s antiquated. Next on Britt-McGraw’s to-do list is the overdue overhaul of a phone system that’s been rendered archaic by 92—and counting—Summit operations.

Good call

With each acquisition might come an incompatible phone system. Five are now in the mix, and should a patient call, all too often, a receptionist must verbally provide the number to the appropriate clinic. Britt-McGraw having enlisted ATT Office at Hand, there will soon be the same answering voice systemwide for directing callers to the appropriate place, call-waiting, and the means to return calls in the order received.

It’s all part of modernizing a growing healthcare operation, the importance of which Britt-McGraw realized long ago at another operation in which a pharmacy was at a loss when needing to recall tainted prescriptions. Acting as a de facto first responder, she jumped into that fire, inserting data and mitigating what could have been a disaster.

While there haven’t been such problems at Summit, Britt-McGraw reminds us there’s never a dull moment when healthcare and infotech meet and the two are forever connected. She might stay connected to Summit for the rest of her tech career, which she didn’t initially envision.

A University of North Carolina Asheville graduate with management and computer science credentials, Britt-McGraw first majored in music. She still had to take a computer class, so she enrolled in programming and found it complemented her musical side, it too involving logical patterns and sequencing.

Upon taking an advanced class and then another, Britt-McGraw rightfully perceived it would make for a more viable career than playing the oboe, which she could still do. Having learned nine programming languages as well as related subjects, her skills were in demand at a time when high-tech included punch cards.

And she rocks

She applied her skills to various industries, starting with a 1991-to-1998 stretch with RR Donnelley, an integrated communications and commercial printing company in Chicago. In 1998, she became a systems analyst at The Walt Disney Co. and followed that with long stretches at two Nashville area companies, O’Charley’s Restaurant & Bar (2001-2012) and Tennessee Orthopaedic Alliance (2012-2020), before answering Summit’s call for a CIO.

Life’s good in Eastern Tennessee, where Britt-McGraw has raised two daughters. The eldest is now a radiologist in St. Louis, and the younger is still deciding on a career path. Come weekends, Britt-McGraw’s likely to be tending her garden or watching over a toddler grandson. She enjoys reading and painting as well.

According to Tennessee’s IT community, Britt-McGraw indeed rocks; she is a two-time winner of the Nashville Business Journal’s CIO of the Year award. At Summit, she’s gotten appreciative notes from the C-suite and various clinicians who have recognized the value of IT streamlining.

But none of those accolades gets to Britt-McGraw’s head. A CIO’s job is never really done.

“There’s always another project to pursue,” she says. “You can’t fall behind on IT.”