What Connection Actually Sells Into a Pediatric Health System
Connection is a Premier Sponsor of CHIME (College of Healthcare Information Management Executives) and runs a dedicated healthcare practice. Shriners Children's is a good structural fit for it: roughly twenty specialty hospitals, more than a hundred outpatient and outreach locations, three electronic health records running at once mid-migration, and a growing genomic-data operation — all coordinated from a small headquarters IT team in Tampa. That shape rewards standardized network, security, and lifecycle work at every site, not one large campus build.
The identity to hold onto with John McFarland: Connection isn't pitching to replace Epic, Cerner, or the clinical systems on top of them. It's pitching to be the infrastructure and lifecycle layer underneath — the network, the endpoints, the data center, the cameras, the power, and the security operations — while Shriners' own IT team runs the migration. The closest thing the practice has to a flagship product is Healthcare-in-a-Box, the only line with its own proper name rather than a category label.
Healthcare PracticeDeployment, Staffing & Managed Operations
- Healthcare-in-a-Box — preconfigured, ready-to-deploy IT kits for opening or refreshing a clinical site, built to compress turn-up time. A direct fit for every new outreach clinic and affiliate space Shriners stands up.
- Healthcare IT staffing — contract technologists who already speak clinical workflow and regulatory language, useful surge capacity during an Epic cutover.
- 24×7 NOC monitoring built around uptime for patient-care systems across many small sites.
Cybersecurity & ComplianceBuilt for a Distributed, IoMT-Heavy Footprint
- 24×7 threat detection and response powered by Cisco XDR, purpose-built for healthcare's device-heavy attack surface and sized for outreach clinics, not just flagship hospitals.
- Security Landscape Optimization — a vulnerability-and-strategy assessment that feeds a risk register rather than producing a PDF; the right instrument for baselining a three-EHR estate mid-migration.
- HIPAA compliance services spanning assessment, documentation, and remediation for a 501(c)(3) covered entity.
Clinical MobilityEndpoints Clinicians and Outreach Teams Carry
- Zebra healthcare line — 300+ SKUs: rugged mobile computers, RFID, scanners, and card/badge printers, standardized for staff who work across multiple sites and travel to outreach clinics.
- OtterBox and UAG rugged cases across iPhone, iPad, Galaxy, and Surface for a fleet that moves between buildings and states.
- Badge and tap-to-unlock single sign-on at clinical workstations — the most direct answer to logon friction as new sites come online.
Data CenterInfrastructure for a System Running Three EHRs at Once
- A dedicated Modern Infrastructure & Data Center practice covering hyperconverged infrastructure — Nutanix and VMware, including Cisco Compute HCI on Nutanix — plus cross-platform virtualization visibility (SolarWinds Virtualization Manager).
- Disaster Recovery Design and DRaaS, plus Backup-as-a-Service — sized for exactly the consolidation window Shriners is in as Cerner Millennium retires behind Epic.
- Colocation reach through partner Expedient for capacity that doesn't need to be built in-house.
Physical SecurityCameras & Access for 100-Plus Small Sites
- Full camera catalog from Axis (410+ SKUs), Motorola (337+ SKUs), and Verkada — relevant to outpatient clinics, ambulatory centers, and shared or affiliate space where Shriners is a tenant.
- Verkada access-control hardware for unifying badge and camera events across sites that currently run whatever the landlord or prior operator installed.
PowerUptime for a Gulf-and-Tropics Geography
- APC (Schneider Electric) — rack UPS to facility scale, and Eaton — BladeUPS, PDU G4, and Intelligent Power Manager software for remote battery-health visibility without a truck roll to a small site.
- Runs seasonal storm-preparedness content — directly relevant to a Tampa headquarters, Gulf Coast hospitals, and facilities in Mexico City and Guadalajara.
LifecycleRefresh & Disposition for the Hardware a Migration Strands
- Lifecycle and refresh services across the Dell, HPE, and Lenovo lines — staged rollout, firmware and compliance baselining, and certified asset disposition for the Cerner-era endpoints and servers Epic leaves behind.
- Sanitized, documented chain of custody for devices that held pediatric PHI — an audit and reputational safeguard, not just a recycling line.
Who Shriners Children's Is Right Now
Shriners Children's just passed its centennial and is halfway through the biggest change to its own shape in that century: from a network of free-standing charity inpatient hospitals to an outpatient-and-outreach system that bills insurance, runs on Epic, and pools genomic data in Tampa. The account has been hard to open partly because the thing Lorie was calling on — a Tampa hospital — stopped existing during that change.
Who They AreFounded 1922, the Philanthropy of a Masonic Fraternity
- Opened its first hospital on May 12, 1922, in Shreveport, Louisiana. It is the official philanthropy of Shriners International, a Masonic fraternity founded in 1870, and both are headquartered in Tampa at 2900 N. Rocky Point Drive.
- Rebranded from "Shriners Hospitals for Children" to Shriners Children's during the centennial period.
- 22 specialty pediatric hospitals and medical centers across the U.S., Canada (Montreal), and Mexico (Mexico City, Guadalajara), plus 100+ outpatient, ambulatory, and outreach locations. The hospital count keeps shifting as inpatient sites convert to outpatient models — one 2025 news account put it at 17.
- Roughly 6,100 employees (third-party estimate). Core specialties: pediatric orthopaedics, burn care, spinal cord injury and rehabilitation, cleft lip and palate, craniofacial, and pediatric urology.
The MoneyEndowment-Backed, Now Billing Insurance
- A 501(c)(3) nonprofit that treats children regardless of ability to pay or insurance status — historically funded almost entirely by an endowment and donations.
- One of the best-endowed health systems in the country for its size: roughly $10 billion in assets as of 2023. Began accepting insurance payments around 2011 as part of the outpatient shift.
- No investor-style public filings — third-party aggregators put annual revenue near $800M; treat any revenue figure as approximate and verify before quoting it back.
- The care-model shift is working on its own terms: about a third of facilities now run as outpatient models, expenses are down, and patient volume hit a record 440,000+ visits in 2021.
The Care-Model ShiftFrom Inpatient Hospitals to an Outreach Network
- Inpatient hospitals are being converted to ambulatory centers; care is increasingly delivered through outreach clinics far from the hospital — the Twin Cities location, for example, now sees patients across South Dakota, Nebraska, and North Dakota.
- Las Vegas is the newest access point (announced March 2026): Shriners is a tenant in Intermountain Health's space on Badura Avenue, first patients in August 2026, with an Intermountain freestanding hospital targeted for 2030.
- Every one of these moves puts Shriners' patient data on smaller sites and, increasingly, on networks and buildings Shriners doesn't own.
Technology in MotionThree EHRs, a Data Warehouse, and a Genomics Bet
- Three EHRs at once: Oracle Cerner Millennium (the legacy standard across all hospitals since ~2011, run from a centralized data center), Epic (outpatient live December 2023, now "deeply into phase 2" bringing Epic into inpatient areas), and HarmoniMD (tablet-based, for outreach and international clinics).
- ViTel Net vCareCommand virtual-care platform ties all three EHRs together over HL7/FHIR, pulls imaging from PACS, and supports site-to-site and direct-to-patient visits. Epic MyChart is the patient portal.
- A Research Data Warehouse combining Cerner and Epic data; a Georgia Tech research affiliation (precision medicine, big data, AI extraction from the EHR); and a new $153M Shriners Children's Research Institute in Atlanta (announced July 2025 — cell and gene therapy, robotics, AI, data science, 470 jobs).
- The Shriners Children's Genomics Institute in Tampa's USF Research Park runs an Illumina NovaSeq (160 whole genomes in two days), targets 5,000 genomes a year, and collects samples from every Shriners site worldwide.
The Shriners hospital on the University of South Florida campus — 12502 USF Pine Drive, a Tampa Bay fixture for 35 years — was downgraded from an inpatient hospital to an outpatient clinic in 2019, renamed Shriners Children's Florida, and then closed entirely on April 1, 2022, with 38 employees laid off. Tampa-area patient care was handed to affiliates: POPS LLC, UF Health, and Jackson Health. There has been no Shriners hospital P&L in Tampa to sell into for years.
What stayed in Tampa is the part that matters for Connection: the enterprise headquarters at Rocky Point Drive that runs IT for all ~20 hospitals and 100+ sites, and the Genomics Institute in USF Research Park. The account was never really a local hospital — it's a headquarters account about twenty minutes up the road, and it appears it was never aimed at that way before.
John McFarland, the CIO, came to Shriners from Chief Technology Officer at Moffitt Cancer Center and, before that, from Cerner itself; he lives in Land O' Lakes. Richard Paula, M.D., the Chief Medical Informatics Officer beside him, was CMIO at Tampa General Hospital and an emergency physician there for nine years, plus a decade teaching at USF's medical school — the same institution Connection's team has already researched to the studs for the TGH account.
The barrier here has been aim, not access. The decision-makers are local, reachable, and speak the same Tampa healthcare-IT language Lorie's team already works in.
Shriners' own Network Engineer II posting asks for Cisco IOS, Cisco wireless, Cisco firewalls, Cisco Unified Communications, and SolarWinds; a Continuant case study says Shriners moved telephony and unified communications onto Cisco across 20 of 22 hospitals starting in 2014, off a legacy Avaya PBX. The LAN and wireless backbone is Cisco. Nothing public shows an Aruba footprint anywhere.
In the data center, HPE is a reasonable bet but unconfirmed — HP and Cerner ran a two-decade hardware OEM partnership, and Cerner Millennium builds of Shriners' 2011 vintage very commonly ran on HP ProLiant servers and HP storage. No case study, contract award, or job posting names HPE, so treat it as a hypothesis to confirm on the first infrastructure call, not a fact.
Why this matters for the door: Lorie's six years at HPE plausibly give her the HPE Florida healthcare and Aruba networking reps. Even a Cisco-network shop buys HPE compute and storage through a partner, and the HPE field rep covering Tampa healthcare likely knows who owns infrastructure at Shriners and has reason to broker a warm intro, since Connection resells HPE and could pull it into a refresh. A Connection-side Cisco field relationship is the stronger lever still, because it matches the stack Shriners actually runs.
Security & Risk — A Clean Record in a Neighborhood Getting Hit
No evidence of a Shriners Children's data breach turned up anywhere in this research — genuinely worth leading with, since it's rare for a twenty-hospital system and pediatric providers are being targeted hard right now. What has changed is the risk shape: three EHRs running at once, a hundred-plus small sites, care moving onto networks Shriners doesn't own, and a permanent genomic-data repository growing in Tampa. Each is a reason for a proactive conversation rather than a reactive one.
In January 2024, Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago was hit by the Rhysida ransomware group. MyChart, the phone system, and the EHR were down for roughly a month; about 791,000 individuals were affected and the attackers demanded $3.4 million. Pediatric records are prized on criminal markets precisely because a child's clean Social Security number and medical history have decades of runway before anyone checks them. Shriners' own record is clean; the neighborhood is not.
Running Cerner Millennium, Epic, and HarmoniMD simultaneously through a multi-year cutover is the widest an attack surface gets: duplicate and stale identities across directories, half-migrated interfaces, and legacy servers kept alive "just until cutover." The right time to baseline asset and vulnerability data across all three is during the migration, while the estate is documented anyway — not after, when the Cerner side has quietly gone dark and nobody's certain what's still plugged in.
The shift to outreach and tenant models means Shriners PHI increasingly rides third-party infrastructure: the Intermountain Health space in Las Vegas where Shriners is a tenant, the affiliate arrangements that absorbed Tampa-area care, and outreach clinics run inside schools, partner clinics, and rented suites. A focused segmentation and vendor-risk review of those boundaries — "let's make sure our side is walled off correctly" — is a low-drama ask that gets easier to say yes to the earlier it's raised.
The Tampa Genomics Institute is pooling whole-genome sequences from patients across every Shriners site worldwide into a single data infrastructure that also feeds the new Atlanta research institute. Genomic data is permanent, familial, and re-identifiable; a breach of it can't be undone by reissuing a card number. As that repository grows, a dedicated data-governance, encryption, and access review — scoped as a research track, on research funding — is a defensible conversation on its own.
Who's in the Room — and Who Actually Signs
Enterprise IT decisions run through a small headquarters team in Tampa. John McFarland is the right first call — he owns the mandate directly. Richard Paula is the warm bridge into that call, and Glen Boomdram is the working-level network contact underneath it. John McCabe sits above them as the senior operating executive, and Sharon Russell's finance organization is where real capital gets approved. Governance sits with the Joint Boards and a fraternity Chairman who changes every year — so a multi-year infrastructure relationship has to be anchored in the permanent staff, not the rotating chair.
| Name | Role | What they optimize for | |
|---|---|---|---|
| John McFarland | Chief Information Officer (target contact) · Land O' Lakes, FL | Came from CTO at Moffitt Cancer Center and, before that, from Cerner — a Tampa-market healthcare-IT leader running enterprise IT strategy, infrastructure, and security for the whole system through a three-EHR consolidation. NC State; Strayer MBA in Management Information Systems. | /in/john-mcfarland |
| Richard Paula, M.D. | Chief Medical Informatics Officer (the bridge) · Tampa, FL | Corporate CMIO since January 2014; previously CMIO at Tampa General Hospital and a TGH emergency physician for nine years, plus 10+ years teaching at USF's medical school. Owns the medical-informatics plan across all hospitals. On record in Becker's arguing EHRs haven't lived up to the hype — a real, current, professional conversation opener. | Verify before use |
| Glen Boomdram | IT Network & Telecommunications Manager (working-level infra contact) | Named and quoted in Continuant's Shriners case study about the Cisco UC rollout, praising a "one hand to shake instead of one throat to choke" managed-services model — a direct tell that Shriners is comfortable outsourcing infrastructure operations. The person who would actually scope network, wireless, and telecom work. Title and tenure are from a case study several years old — verify he's still in seat. | Verify before use |
| John McCabe | Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer · Tampa, FL | The senior-most full-time executive on the leadership team. Anything that becomes a multi-track relationship eventually needs his awareness; frame scope in operating-continuity terms, not technology terms, when it reaches him. | Verify before use |
| Sharon Russell | Vice President, Finance and Accounting · Tampa, FL | Where capital approval lives. Frame every ask with a payback or risk-reduction argument she can carry, even when the working conversation stays with McFarland. | Verify before use |
| Nathan Stephens, J.D. | Chief Compliance Officer · Tampa, FL | Owns HIPAA and regulatory exposure. The natural co-sponsor for anything touching PHI handling, vendor risk, or genomic-data governance — bring him in early on those, not late. | Verify before use |
| Marc Lalande, Ph.D. | Vice President, Research · founder, Genomics Institute (Tampa) | Runs the research organization and the Tampa Genomics Institute. The data-governance track (Topic 11) is his to sponsor, on research funding, separate from the hospital IT budget. | Verify before use |
| Scott Kozin, M.D. | Chief Medical Officer (since April 2026) | Nearly 30 years as a hand surgeon and chief of staff at Shriners Children's Philadelphia before this corporate role. Not an IT buyer — included for context on a leadership bench that is still settling. | Verify before use |
| Leslie D. Stewart, M.D. | President, Board of Directors (governance) | A governance role, not a full-time operating one. Named here so the org chart reads correctly — the executive team, not this seat, is where a vendor relationship is built. | Verify before use |
| Lawrence "Larry" Leib | 2026 Imperial Potentate · Chairman of the Board (Farmington Hills, MI) | Elected annually. Serves a one-year term as CEO of Shriners International and Chairman of the Shriners Children's Board. The role rotates every year — which is exactly why a Connection relationship must live in the permanent executive team. | — |
Building Rapport, Responsibly
Shriners International is a fraternal order with its own history, ritual, and internal politics. None of that is a rapport tool here — it isn't the business Connection is selling into, and treating it as an icebreaker reads as either uninformed or opportunistic. Two better, current, and directly professional openers instead:
The Real OpenerRichard Paula's Public Record Is a Ready-Made Bridge
Paula spent nine years as a TGH emergency physician and served as TGH's CMIO before Shriners — the exact institution Connection's team already knows in depth. He has also gone on record in Becker's about EHRs underdelivering on their promises. That's a genuine, public, professional touchpoint: a shared frame of reference about Tampa healthcare IT and about what the Epic migration actually has to earn.
The Second OpenerMcFarland's Own Path — Cerner, Then Moffitt, Then Here
McFarland's career is a public, professional story: from Cerner to CTO at Moffitt Cancer Center to CIO at Shriners, all in the Tampa market. It's the person Lorie is actually calling, and it means he has lived on the vendor side, the academic-medical-center side, and now the nonprofit-system side — a much stronger rapport foundation than anything requiring outside research into his personal life.
Connection: Who's on Our Side
Unlike some accounts in this series, Connection has a real, named healthcare practice to stand behind here — and a CHIME Premier sponsorship that gives the first call credibility.
The RepLorie Tomlinson — Vendor-Side Depth, New Badge
Lorie's path runs through Tech Data (channel sales), Insight (business development), and six years at Hewlett Packard Enterprise — Business Partner & Manager, then Enterprise Account Manager — before joining Connection on January 1, 2026. Her HPE years ran deep in storage and server infrastructure, disaster recovery and backup, and Aruba networking — direct depth behind the data-center, DR, and network topics below.
Shriners is effectively her first major healthcare engagement at Connection. The job here is to stop working a shuttered hospital as a local account and re-aim at enterprise IT at headquarters, using the Epic migration as the reason to open a real conversation now.
Her HPE alumni network is a second asset worth spending: the Florida healthcare and Aruba networking reps she worked alongside for six years can help name the infrastructure owner at Shriners and broker a warm intro — a parallel path to the Richard Paula route, not a replacement for it. See the "Cisco on the Network" case file above for what the stack actually looks like.
| Name | Role | Background | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mickey Bland | President, Enterprise Solutions Group | Joined Connection in Nov. 2022 after ~24 years at Insight Enterprises, most recently SVP & GM of Major Accounts and Global Sales. Reports directly to CEO Tim McGrath — the executive sponsor sitting above the healthcare practice. | /in/mickey-bland |
| Jennifer Johnson, CDH-L | Sr. Director, Healthcare Strategy & Business Development | At Connection since 2010, in the healthcare practice since 2015. CHIME Certified Digital Health Leader; NVIDIA AI Advisor and Dell AI Champion certified; CRN Women of the Channel 2023 and 2024. The practice's lead strategist — bring her in for an executive-level healthcare conversation. | /in/jennifer-johnson-cdh-l |
| Kelly Kempf, CDH-P | Healthcare Strategy Manager | At Connection since 2013; previously at Express Scripts. Runs healthcare go-to-market strategy, vendor engagement, and internal healthcare sales training — the person who'd help scope and staff a multi-topic deal like this one. | /in/kelly-kempf-cdh-p |
Where to Meet Them — The Health-IT Calendar, Not the Fraternity's
A parallel channel to the direct call. The fraternity's own annual convention is not a vendor channel and shouldn't be treated as one. The health-IT circuit is — and Connection already has standing at part of it. Dates and host cities below should be reconfirmed before booking; trade-show calendars move.
CHIME · Connection Already SponsorsCHIME Fall Forum
- CHIME's flagship gathering of health-system CIOs and digital leaders. Connection is a Premier Sponsor of CHIME — the first call to McFarland can reasonably reference that shared community rather than opening cold.
- Confirm the 2026 dates and host city internally, and whether Connection is activating a meeting space there this year.
March · AnnualHIMSS Global Health Conference
- The largest health-IT event of the year; the kind of show a system's whole IT leadership team attends. The natural place to get time with McFarland's directors alongside the direct sales motion.
- Confirm the 2027 host city and whether Connection exhibits before assuming a booth presence.
Atlanta · Opening ~Late 2026Shriners Children's Research Institute / Georgia Tech
- The $153M institute at Science Square Labs, across from Georgia Tech, is a physical place where Shriners' research and data leadership will be concentrating — cell and gene therapy, robotics, AI, data science. Georgia Tech has already run 25 projects with Shriners.
- Worth a plan to be visibly present as it stands up, through the Georgia Tech Pediatric Innovation Network rather than a cold approach.
Tampa · LocalUSF Research Park & the Tampa Bay Health-Tech Scene
- The Genomics Institute sits in USF Research Park, minutes from Connection's existing Tampa relationships. Local USF, Tampa Bay Wave HealthTech, and Tampa Bay Business & Wealth events are low-cost ways to be in the same rooms as Shriners' research and IT staff without travel.
Shriners International held its 152nd Imperial Session in Tampa in July 2026 (it moves to Philadelphia in 2027). It is the fraternity's annual convention — a membership and ritual event, not a healthcare-technology trade show, and not a place to pursue an enterprise IT conversation. Noted here only so it isn't mistaken for an opportunity.
The 30-60-90 Day Plan
This is a stalled account, not a warm one — Lorie has been trying to get into "Shriners in Tampa" for years. The plan is built on one correction: the Tampa hospital she was calling on closed in 2022, and the account that's actually buyable is enterprise IT at the Rocky Point headquarters, where the Cerner-to-Epic migration is live right now. The RACE arc — Reach, Act, Convert, Engage — still underlies it; the calendar below makes it concrete.
Days 1–30 · Reach & ReframeGet a First Working Meeting With the CIO
- Objective: a real first meeting with John McFarland — not another reintroduction to a hospital that no longer exists.
- Do this: ask Richard Paula for a warm introduction, leaning on the shared TGH / Tampa healthcare-IT context. Open the McFarland conversation on the Cerner-to-Epic phase-2 migration as the reason for the call.
- First ask in hand: a one-page scope for an asset-and-vulnerability baseline across the three-EHR estate during the migration (Topic 02) — no PO, no board conversation.
- Internal: confirm with Jennifer Johnson and Kelly Kempf that the CHIME Premier sponsorship and healthcare practice can be named credibly; pull Healthcare-in-a-Box collateral for outreach-site standardization.
- Work the channel, in parallel: Lorie taps her HPE alumni network — the Florida healthcare and Aruba networking reps she knows — to identify who actually owns infrastructure at Shriners and ask for a warm intro, ideally with an HPE compute or storage angle so the HPE field team is motivated to help. If anyone at Connection carries a Cisco field relationship, use that too — it matches Shriners' real stack. Glen Boomdram is the working-level name to get to.
- Avoid: pitching a "Tampa hospital" engagement or treating this as a single-site account — that framing is why years of effort stalled.
Days 31–60 · ScopeTurn the Meeting Into a Funded Engagement
- Objective: convert the first meeting into one scoped, budgeted engagement — not twelve open threads.
- Do this: run the twelve-conversation sequence with McFarland and let his answers pick the first thread. The likeliest first yes is the migration-window security baseline (Topic 02) or outreach-site standardization via Healthcare-in-a-Box (Topic 06).
- Bring in: Sharon Russell's finance organization for anything with real capital; Nathan Stephens (Compliance) for anything touching HIPAA or genomic-data governance.
- Watch: no CISO is named publicly — establish early whether McFarland owns the security decision himself or there's an unnamed security lead to include.
- Success metric: a signed SOW on one engagement, plus a clear read on the enterprise IT budget cycle and who signs.
Days 61–90 · LandDeliver Clean, Then Scope the Second
- Objective: one engagement delivering well, and a second thread already scoped.
- Do this: deliver the first engagement cleanly — this is the credibility that years of cold outreach never earned. Pair it with a proactive segmentation and vendor-risk review of the affiliate and tenant boundaries (Las Vegas/Intermountain, Tampa-area affiliates, outreach sites — Topic 03).
- Position separately: the Genomics Institute data-governance review (Topic 11) as a research-funded track with Marc Lalande's organization, distinct from the hospital IT budget.
- Success metric: first engagement in delivery, second SOW in draft, and a standing monthly touch with McFarland's team.
Beyond 90 · EngageBe the Default Before Atlanta Opens
- Objective: be the standing infrastructure partner before the Atlanta Research Institute opens and before the next hospital-to-outpatient conversion.
- Do this: land the branch-standardization and lifecycle tracks (Topics 06, 12); position Healthcare-in-a-Box as the onboarding template for every new outreach site and affiliate space.
- Owner: Lorie, escalating to Mickey Bland once the account carries multi-track scope; Jennifer Johnson for executive-level healthcare strategy conversations.
- Governance note: anchor the relationship in the permanent executive team — McFarland, McCabe, Russell — so it survives the annual change of Imperial Potentate and board Chairman.
- Success metric: a standing MSA spanning at least two tracks, positioned ahead of the Atlanta opening rather than reacting to it.
Twelve Conversations With John McFarland
Written as one continuous first call, broken into twelve movements. Each opens with why it lands specifically at Shriners, then a rehearsal script — not real quotes from either person, built from public information about the account.
The Cerner-to-Epic Migration Is the Whole Conversation
Epic went live for outpatient in December 2023; phase 2 is bringing it into inpatient areas now. A live, multi-year enterprise EHR migration is exactly when network, identity, endpoint, and data-center decisions get made — or get deferred and become next year's problem.
An Asset & Vulnerability Baseline While Three EHRs Run at Once
Cerner, Epic, and HarmoniMD running simultaneously through a cutover is the widest an attack surface gets — stale identities, half-migrated interfaces, legacy servers kept alive "just until cutover." The estate is documented anyway during migration; that's the cheap moment to baseline it.
A Segmentation Review of the Affiliate & Tenant Sites
Care is moving onto networks Shriners doesn't own — the Intermountain space in Las Vegas, the affiliates that absorbed Tampa-area care, outreach clinics inside partner buildings. Nothing has gone wrong; that's exactly why now is the moment to check the boundary.
24×7 Threat Detection Across 100-Plus Small Sites
Lurie Children's in Chicago lost its EHR and phones for a month to Rhysida ransomware in 2024. Coverage that's solid at the flagship hospitals and thin at a two-room outreach clinic is the gap those attacks find.
Data-Center Consolidation as Cerner Retires
Cerner Millennium has run from a centralized data center across all hospitals since around 2011. As Epic takes over, that footprint becomes a decision: consolidate, shift to DRaaS, run hybrid, or move capacity to colocation.
Healthcare-in-a-Box for Every New Outreach Site & Affiliate Space
The care model now depends on standing up small sites quickly — the Las Vegas access point is just the latest. Each one currently gets built a little differently depending on what the space and the landlord provide.
Managed Service Desk for a Small Team Covering a Continent
Roughly 6,100 employees and 100-plus sites across three countries, coordinated from one Tampa headquarters IT organization. The geography grew faster than the team.
Physical Security Standardization Across the Outreach Network
Outpatient clinics, ambulatory centers, and shared or affiliate space inherit whatever camera and access-control setup the building or prior operator had — rarely a Shriners standard.
Storm-Ready Power for a Gulf-and-Tropics Footprint
The headquarters is in Tampa; there are hospitals along the Gulf Coast and facilities in Mexico City and Guadalajara. Power reliability at the small sites is usually where visibility is thinnest.
Clinical & Field Mobility for Outreach Teams
Clinicians who rotate between a hospital and outreach clinics, and teams that travel to see patients across several states, run on devices that move constantly and log in repeatedly.
Data Governance for the Genomics Institute Repository
The Tampa Genomics Institute is pooling whole-genome data from every Shriners site into one infrastructure that also feeds the Atlanta institute. Genomic data is permanent, familial, and re-identifiable — a different risk class than a card number.
Lifecycle & ITAD for the Hardware the Migration Strands
A cutover from Cerner to Epic across twenty hospitals leaves a trail of endpoints and servers that held pediatric PHI and are about to be surplus. How they're retired is an audit and reputational question, not just a recycling one.
The Close
Leave with one committed next step and a clear reframe, not twelve open threads.
- This week: ask Richard Paula for a warm introduction to John McFarland, then send McFarland a one-page scope for a migration-window asset & vulnerability baseline across the three-EHR estate — no PO, no board.
- Second door, same week: Lorie works her HPE alumni contacts (Florida healthcare and Aruba networking reps) and any Connection-side Cisco field relationship to find the infrastructure owner at Shriners and get a warm intro — HPE is likelier to help if there's a compute or storage refresh to attach. Target Glen Boomdram at the working level.
- Paired ask: a lightweight segmentation and vendor-risk review of the affiliate and tenant sites (Las Vegas/Intermountain, Tampa-area affiliates, outreach clinics), framed as timely given the Las Vegas model, not as criticism.
- Parallel one-pagers: Healthcare-in-a-Box outreach standardization, 24×7 XDR detection for small sites, managed service desk, storm-ready power, and lifecycle/ITAD — sized for whenever a budget cycle opens.
- Research track: take the Genomics Institute data-governance review to Marc Lalande's organization separately, on research funding, not hospital IT budget.
- Finance & compliance: bring Sharon Russell's team into any ask with real capital behind it; bring Nathan Stephens in on anything touching HIPAA or genomic-data governance.
- Escalation & durability: Mickey Bland is Connection's executive-sponsor path once the account carries multi-track scope; Jennifer Johnson or Kelly Kempf for healthcare strategy. Anchor the relationship in McFarland, McCabe, and Russell — not the board Chairman, who changes every year.
Sources
- Connection — Healthcare Technology
- Connection — Healthcare Managed Services
- Connection — Cybersecurity Services
- Connection — Modern Infrastructure & Data Center Solutions
- Connection — Zebra Healthcare Solutions
- Connection — Mobility & Security in Healthcare
- Connection IR — Mickey Bland Joins as President, Enterprise Solutions
- Connected (Connection Blog) — Jennifer Johnson Author Page
- Connected (Connection Blog) — Kelly Kempf Author Page
- Shriners Children's — About
- Shriners Children's — Leadership & Governance
- Shriners Children's — Executive Leadership Team
- Shriners Children's — Chief Medical Officer Scott H. Kozin, M.D. (April 2026)
- Shriners Children's — Annual Report (Epic outpatient go-live Dec 2023, phase 2 inpatient)
- Shriners Children's — Annual Report 2023–2024
- Shriners Children's — Genomics Institute Laboratory (Tampa, USF Research Park)
- Illumina — Shriners Children's Genomics Institute Sequencing Initiative
- ViTel Net — Shriners Children's Virtual Care Case Study (Epic, Oracle Cerner, HarmoniMD)
- Shriners Children's — MyChart Patient Portal
- Georgia Tech Research — Shriners & Georgia Tech Research Affiliation
- Georgia Tech Research — Shriners & Georgia Tech Collaborate on Research Data Resources
- Becker's Hospital Review — CMIO Dr. Richard Paula on EHRs
- WUSF — Shriners Children's $153M Research Facility in Atlanta (17 hospitals figure)
- Office of the Governor of Georgia — Shriners Children's Research Institute Coming to Atlanta (470 jobs)
- Shriners Children's — Welcoming Shriners Children's to Las Vegas (Intermountain tenant model)
- WUSF — Shriners Hospitals for Children Is Closing Its Tampa Facility
- Tampa Bay Times — Shriners to Close Tampa Children's Clinic, Lay Off Employees
- Becker's Hospital Review — Shriners Children's Florida to Permanently Close
- FOX 13 Tampa Bay — Shriners to Close Outpatient Facility, Keep Headquarters in Tampa
- HIPAA Journal — January 2024 Cyberattack on Lurie Children's Hospital (792K)
- Shriners International — 152nd Imperial Session, Tampa (July 2026)
- Wikipedia — Shriners Hospitals for Children (endowment ~$10B, 2023)
- Zippia — Shriners Hospitals for Children (employee & revenue estimates, unofficial)
- LinkedIn Jobs — Shriners Children's Network Engineer II (Cisco IOS, Cisco wireless, Cisco firewall, SolarWinds)
- Continuant — Shriners Hospitals for Children Case Study (Cisco UC across 20 of 22 hospitals; Glen Boomdram quote)
- HPE Newsroom — HPE and Cerner OEM Partnership (context for the HPE data-center inference)