Misys Fires Healthcare CEO Tom Skelton

So IBM Global Services pedigree will ensure more offshoring to IBM, India?

Getting rid of Skelton is a good first step. I doubt that this particular piece of news will make the people in Tucson feel much better.

YES. Skelton is gone.... Now to clean out the other "cronies" and maybe they will be able to salvage this company. This is a good first step. Now let's see who is next.

This is a good start...Misys has continually let some of its best people get away from them and those that do remain (at least at the managerial level) are so average that the company will need some time to build up its bench of good people. There are nimble companies everywhere eating the Misys business up in huge chunks now!

C'mon Misys employees. Let's hear the details! This is long overdue.

Hopefully the next step will be to clean out Business Development and Product Management - these folks are mostly Skelton "yes men and women".

As an ex-employee it makes me very sad that Misys has been allowed to get into the shape it is in today by a management team who didn't truly understand the employee dedication or the customer's mission. They have decimated this company and destroyed most of the employee morale in the process. Misys/Sunquest used to be one of the top 100 employers in southern Arizona, and I'm surprised the paper hasn't taken the time to interview employees and find out what is really happening under the covers. Current and ex-employees are still loyal to the company and only wish the best for the company and its customers.

Looks like the Pittsburgh mafia is crumbling. For all those people who were "let go" by Misys..... it just makes you want to smile. What goes around, comes around.

Best of luck to Mike Lawrie and the talent (what is still left) in turning the company around. Keep cleaning house Mike, you have more to go!

As an ex Misys employee, and a sr. manager, I can only say that this move comes way too late. Skelton's lack of leadership and lack of understanding of healthcare was the cause of the demise of the company. We all speculated that with Lomax out of the picture, Skelton would have nowhere to hide. There are so few good people left at Misys, they will be rebuilding for a long time. The silver lining in all of this is that TS is now out. Hopefully his henchmen will soon follow. No improvements would ever be made while TS was CEO. Lets hope they bring in someone of caliber.

Have to agree with anonymous...Misys had a truly great culture for many years and was a terrific place to work. Many dedicated employees. There have been too many short sighted decisions made over the last few years and you have to believe if management had done a better job at looking at the big picture several years ago, there would be a lot less chaos today. It is sad that so many great folks have not been able to stick it out. Misys does has some great stuff to offer their clients - hopefully plenty of customers will stick with them until Lawrie and team figure it out.

Skelton's departure was long overdue. Probably too late to save MISYS.If Paul Lewis is Sr. VP Sales and Services ,is Kelly Schudy (one of the good guys) gone or pushed to the back?

It would appear that a bevy of employees were let go from the Misys office in Johnstown, PA. I understand this was the hub of development for their Radiology product. If true, this would be sad to see the decline of what was once a proud corner of the Misys company that took it's roots back to the days of Sunquest. There was also news that those remaining in the Johnstown office will see their office closed later this year with all but a handful of employees being let go.

Rejoice! The King is dead!!!

Does this mean no "hooters" girls prancing around in Misys T-shirts at HIMSS this year?

Tom is Bull; Sunquest his china shop. To date, the 'A'-talent boobs that wrecked the company and brought us Stretch assignments, Color-coding for merit ranking, and the 'goose' factory have all either jumped ship or been pushed overboard. This is a bit of poetic justice but I fear too little, too late, for the current Misys employees and customers. It was a great company until the circus came to town in '01.

It's too bad this took so long. So many clients and employees have been hurt by Skelton's lack of leadership due to insecurity and lack of experience and education. Lawrie figured this out quickly...good news for shareholders. The goose was finally cooked. It's hard to imagine how an entire industry can know how weak Skelton is yet he survived this long. I'm sure the opportunities for future employment will be limited.

But, as shareholders, let's put this behind us and hope Lawrie continues to focus on the future, on customers, on performance, on productivity, on innovation, on honesty/integrity...on results. He's off to a great start but he has to keep tearing down the Skelton house before the rebuild begins.

Misys under Skelton's leadership was the most dysfunctional company I have ever heard of or worked for. You can't make this stuff up. Zero business acumen. A revolving door for excellent talent except anyone who had previously worked at Elcomp Systems in Pittsburgh. Now they are almost all gone or at least exposed for the incompetence they breed. Crash and burn baby!!

it's just sad when the corporate world and their decisions effects hundreds of employee's lives ... no doubt there were many fabrications for employee firing. "RIGHT THE SHIP" MISYS, give us our jobs back !!! LET THE PEOPLE SAY SO !!! "RIGHT THE SHIP"

Misys had a layoff last week and let more people go. I'm surprised Misys clients are not up in arms about what is going on with the company. If they are not aware of how poorly things have been managed, then I would say they were deliberately kept out of the dark. If I were a client, I would be looking for a new vendor ASAP. I can't imagine Misys can continue to survive.

I TRUELY hope this is the start of a bright new beginning for the many wonderful and gifted people working the front lines everyday. The crap we all had to put up with. Skills, Talent, Loyalty, Work Ethic….Compassion looked upon as a fault, Quantity valued over Quality, management filled with incompetents and 'yes' men all focused on grabbing that next rung of the ladder, vying for visibility - the Stress, the Frustration ….the never-ending feeling that the next target might be you. Sad - so sad……

How about bringing Rob Kill back?

Long overdue. Many times I regret being part of the team that sold to Misys. All they cared about was hanging an upside down "M" on the building and didn't focus on strategy. Sunquest and its wonderful staff were client focused and leaders in the field. It has been decimated but can be revived.

One comment that always stuck with me when I was in Tucson was that the "old executive management" truly cared about the employees. One of the executives actually called a manager into his office after she had to let go her first employee. He wanted to make sure she was alright and to discuss the decision to let the employee go. That says a lot about the way things were before "purple" came in and destroyed those relationships. There are so many people out there who were destroyed by this latest management team. Yes, many of us moved on, but we will never forget being made to feel that our passion and commitment to the clients was trivial and not part of the culture anymore. Those of us who were there for awhile were actually made to feel on a daily basis that it was time to move on. Good luck with trying to find employees who are currently there who will stick it out for any length of time. Those of us who cared and who would do anything for the company are on the outside....being thankful we got out with our integrity in tact.

MISYS has the potential to be a real powerhouse if it can pull together a unified vision and truly execute. Tom Skelton while a good person, had his chance. Now it is time for MISYS to pull in new executive management, give it's software more functionality above and beyond what can be attained from CERNER or MCKESSON etc. The time is ripe for this change. IS MISYS up to the challenge? Can they have a true end to end solution? People inherently like MISYS but the company been under the wrong managment.

Unfortunately, IBM Global Services is the worst Service organization out there.. and don't care .. If this is the new management....Best of Luck...

I hope they don't stop with Skelton. They need to look into the business units as well. My former unit (homecare) has plenty of ineptness at the top. They should just clear them out as well. I mean "how hard could it be?"

As a former Misys guy myself, I can't help but smile a little bit at the chaos that is ensuing over there. When I started there, the employee culture was wonderful. Gradually, though, that culture was replaced by a culture of backstabbing and managerial incompetence, one where everyone had to fight for their jobs by any means necessary in order to be "tough". It really did start with the Pittsburgh mafia, several of whom I also had to work for for brief stints. I hope the company dies a quick death and I'm so glad I work in a great environment now!:) Note to Misys: instead of toughness, why don't you try to make employees actually WANT to come into work every day?

From Dave and the Boys...thank God for small miracles!!

Many of the comments here suggest ex-employees who were with the company back in it's 'startup' days. Much of what I read sounds like the (relatively) normal growing pains of the business and attempts to place blame ... maybe rightfully so. What surprises me is that nobody points out the gaping holes in our "technology" and the technology staff (R&D), especially at the managerial level. MANY of the current R&D managers are long-time employees who have been promoted from within, but have little to no experience in the SDLC. Yes, the company develops software for the healthcare industry, but does that mean a nurse should be managing software developers and testers??? They need to clean house and build a software development organization that understands and is experienced in software development!

I worked at Misys and had good times until the boys at the top got greedy. I saw this coming a few years back and left on my own accord. No surprise they didn't like that as I went out on top. Their market share slips each day.

After many years of chaotic lackluster service and broken promises, we moved our business to Greenway. What a difference...Somebody turned on the lights.

I was there from 1994 to 2000. I got to meet Tom personally many times, as my projects were high profile ones and they all were getting done. It was later, in around 2000, that I lost respect for this man and decided to just jump ship. The backstabbing, the incompetence, the sheer ignorance of people like him made me leave, on my own accord and while on top, to become self-employed. I happened to have learned about his firing recently, by accident, and it safe to say that it was long, long overdue. Tom's was always hiding behind other people, and this is why he was able to survive for so long. I would have fired him back in 2000 myself if I had the power.

Yes, Misys technology is behind the times and have lost the customer support touch. Come on Cobol data base for +Medic and Tiger , what is that! They invest 20 million plus each year on R and D on what ??? Upper management in US and London has focused on themselves ,leaving the customer behind forgetting how they got there is the first place. They have no concept of project management and most of time the customer drives the project. They have fired all of there employees that reach salary cap thus cutting there own throats. See you had a good thing and greed killed the dream, thanks to the bean counters in London and corporate BS. Greg Manning from Donald Trump you should be fired!! I hope you choke on all of the money you made in stock. I hope bad karma comes your way soon. Puppet boy. Thanks for the favor you did getting me out of there!!!

Some ships are just destined for icebergs! I literally got down on my knees and thanked God for delivering me out of Misys (bondage!) the day I left. I can honestly say Misys was the worst company I ever had the displeasure of working for! Early on I knew two things were eminent: 1. Tom Skelton would be fired for incompetence and 2. Misys Healthcare would fail due to buggy products based on legacy software. The lieing, deception, trickery, strectching goals purpetrated by managers on employees was a nightmare! One of the employees got so fed up with it, he or she communicated one of the many internal problems to a customer and TS sent an email, "Around the Water Cooler" telling everyone that "What happens in the company, stays in the company." This man actually thought employee loyalty to him was so great we would just blindly obey. Fear tatics were used routinely by managers to force employees in to working long hours. The manager I worked for told me when she interviewed with TS he told her "We're not here to make software, we're here to make MONEY!" Make no mistake, quality took a far back seat to profit at Misys, which as everyone can now see was there down fall. Misys had to pay $925,000.00 in back pay to hourly employees who were wrongly classified as exempt employees. I feel sorry for the cusotmers and those few good employees left. I can only hope TS and all his Pittsburgh Mafia cronies rot in hell!

Well, well, well! Just got the news today TS got kicked to the curb a year ago and now Misys is crumbling. Looks like Tom's chickens came home to roost. My only regret is I wasn't there to video tape his sorry ... being walked to the door, like he or his henchmen (hencewomen) did to so many great people. I hope he has truly suffered over the past year, 100 fold more than all the pain he inflicted on employees, and that he has been unable to locate work. He thought he was all that and a bag of potato chips! In realty, we all knew he was just a looser! That man, I say that man is about as sharp as a marble! Hopefully he carried his monkey ... back to PA where he came from!

Misys made the mistake of hiring a young, inexperienced and imcompetent TS. TS made several mistakes such as thinking acquisitions alone were going to be seen as gobling up market share. The next mistake he made was alienating himself and senior managers from employees by treating them as slaves. Big mistake! Its OK for management to be tough as long as they treat everyone equally, with respect and most importantly fairly. The amount of resentment and hatred employees habored towards management in this company was greater than any I have ever seen. He also failed to realize that true companies grow by their products reputation. Healthcare software is not sexy and therefore hard to sell. It must be easy to use, feature rich, fast and cost efficient. The real smart guy in this whole debacle was John O'Connell. He knew early on the software was based on legacy products and literally full of holes. He made millions by dumping this company at the right time.

Thank God Skelton has gone back to PA! I see he and one of his goons, Rich Goldberg, formed a joke (company) called Confluence Medical Systems in Pittsburgh. Skelton has named himself Chief Executive Officer of a two person company, that way he can lie to his family and tell them he is still a CEO. Not only did this clown ruin Misys Healthcare, he humiliated himself and his family by getting fired. Now Misys is in ashes, nobody wants to have anything to do with the company! I use to work for a couple women who thought Skelton was 'uncanny' the way he could think up great questions to ask them during a BU review. The clown knew what questions he was going to ask and didn't tell them and they thought he was 'uncanny'! One of them was promoted to HomeCare President and then ask for a demotion when she knew the crap was going to hit the fan. Press release said she was managing 'more' people. How embarrasiing could she get? I only wish I could manage skelton and both of the idiot women so I could have the pleasure of firing all three!