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Photo by Ron Hamlow – Hudson Health Plan
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The 115,000 people who access healthcare through Hudson Health Plan are lucky to have Ian Flor on their side. Leading a team of IT professionals, he re-imagined and reconfigured the organization’s data so that Hudson’s employees could better serve those who fall under their care. He’s a 28-year-old, self-taught, IT guru.
In 2009 when Flor, a Cortlandt Manor resident, joined Hudson Health Plan, a not-for-profit Medicaid managed care group operating throughout the lower Hudson Valley, he was frustrated by the difficulty he faced generating useful reports from Hudson’s terabytes of data—data that supply healthcare providers with critical information relating to patient care. You might expect Flor, with a BA in business administration and little experience with computer programming, to have summoned the IT squad. Not so. “I learned how to program and extract information so I could answer my own questions and not wait for others,” he says. So Flor, with some help from Hudson staff members, taught himself computer programming, report generating, and code writing.
“He’s a huge catalyst for change,” says Catherine Clancy, senior vice president and chief strategy officer of Hudson Health Plan. “He’s done for us what no one else has been able to do: reorganize our data services.” She’s not exaggerating —Hudson hired one of the top data warehousing consultants in the business to do the job. That consultant failed.
Flor led a team in creating Hudson’s daily hospital census report, with the goal of reducing “potentially preventable readmissions” by alerting primary-care providers of their patients’ admittance and discharge from inpatient care so that doctors could administer follow-up care, reducing the chance of repeat hospital visits. He recreated Hudson’s online Provider Portal, which grants healthcare providers instant access to critical information relating to their patients’ medical history, claim status, eligibility, etc. As a result, call volume at the Hudson’s call center fell dramatically, while Portal usage has risen from 300 users in 2010 to more than 2,500 current users, an 800-percent increase.
After four promotions in less than three years, Flor today is the manager of data operations and project management. “Ian serves as an intermediary between our data folks and the real world—bridging the gap between business, users, and technology. He has more than quadrupled their productivity,” Clancy, his boss, says. He’s aiming to be a CTO (chief technology officer) someday, and Clancy is certain he’ll succeed.
—PG