Betty Jo Rocchio
Title: Vice President, Perioperative Performance Acceleration
Organization: Mercy
Years in HIT: 12
Previous Responsibilities: Director, Surgical Services, Mount Carmel East Hospital; System Director, Surgical Services, Mount Carmel Health System; Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer, Mount Carmel New Albany Surgical Hospital, 2005-2008
Significant Achievements: Rocchio designed and implemented a system-wide preference card reorganization and cleanup with an automated, centralized maintenance process that produced savings of $1.2 million. She created a system-wide Perioperative Business Dashboard that uses productivity metrics (first case on-time starts, OR utilization, block utilization, room and physician turnover time) to provide transparency to financial, efficiency, cost-per-case data, and outcome measures on the Mercy Intranet. Utilization of the dashboard has saved $25.3 million over three years in cost-per-case across the Mercy System. She implemented a system-wide policy development initiative to increase standardization, improve quality outcomes, and assist front-line teams with education and ease of implementation.
Impact on HIT: Throughout her career and at every post, Rocchio has complemented and bolstered her experience as a transformative surgical services executive with the successful management of HIT projects. This unique ability to manage both the business and clinical aspects using HIT as an enabler has had a profound influence within the hospitals in which she has served. In general, her track record over the years, which includes management of anesthesia, pre-admission testing, pre-operative area, operating room, post anesthesia care unit, sterile processing, and endoscopy at both an individual hospital and system level, lends itself naturally to a vision of HIT-related excellence.
In particular, her HIT-related strategic plans have often spoke to accountability; whether creating a perioperative system that provides transparency to financial and case-related detail, a financial budgeting template for FTE’s that requires that consistent principles will be applied across the hospital system, or the implementation of a new process for sponge counting across hospitals called “Accountable Executive,” Rocchio has adopted HIT as an enabler to clinical quality and efficiencies.
Rocchio’s overall HIT strategy also includes patient safety; from the development and management of the successful conversion of the paper OR record to an electronic record using the ORSOS Web Periop product, the implementation of safety guidelines and supported funding for all centrally monitored beds that included telemetry and pulse oximetry, to the execution of a major electronic health record system in surgical services, Rocchio has focused on a standardized approach to improve quality outcomes.