Claiborne Memorial Medical Center’s Angie Costakis explains how a 47-bed public hospital funds IT through grants and budgets to keep new systems running. Watch below or on YouTube.

Grant writing is a standing part of Angie Costakis’ job as COO and CIO at Claiborne Memorial Medical Center in Homer, La. In fact, when a needed project has no money behind it, the executives go find it, she said. Speaking on a recent episode of the healthsystemCIO Show, Costakis described how the 47-bed public hospital has won federal equipment grants and Rural Health Transformation funding, is pursuing state cybersecurity grants and works with congressional offices on more. She will bring that rural perspective to a keynote policy panel at the CHIME26 Fall Forum on Nov. 13.

At a hospital of Claiborne Memorial’s size, grant writing falls to whoever needs the money. Costakis does much of it herself, and so do the hospital’s chief nursing officer and CEO. Her own portfolio already reaches well past IT into maintenance, dietary, housekeeping, biomedical equipment, marketing and security. As a result, she treats grants as one more discipline to learn, the same way she learned therapeutic diets from the hospital’s dietitian.

Need drives the work. She cited two leaking water heaters and an unfunded $130,000 replacement project as the kind of need that sends the team looking for money. “When you’re hungry enough, you’re going to go find the money to be able to do that,” she said.

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