As a former CIO, I understand and appreciate the value of health IT teams. Over the years, the IT professionals I’ve worked with have been some of the most hard-working, operationally-savvy, and often under-appreciated people I’ve ever met.As I start the next phase of my career here at Voalte, I want to take the opportunity to celebrate National Health IT Week by recognizing those who work hard behind the scenes to keep our healthcare systems running smoothly. Our IT teams have an incredible amount of knowledge about how their hospitals operate and how departments interact with each other. They need to take a “bird’s eye view” of the entire hospital or health system to connect many pieces of the infrastructure and systems that must work together. The systems they maintain touch thousands of people, yet they often are not invited to the table for important discussions, where their knowledge of “how things really work” would be an asset.
At Johns Hopkins Medicine Community Division, our IT teams worked hard every day to implement systems that augmented the hospital’s strategy in a way that was safe, reliable and least disruptive to the end users. Leadership and end users are often oblivious to the level of complexity, planning and choreography that goes into a system implementation or just maintaining daily IT operations. True health IT professionals rarely drag everyone through the “sausage making,” nor should they. As a result, many heroic efforts, creative strategies and planning go uncelebrated. The result of their work often involves avoiding a disaster, keeping systems available and safe through a critical event, or identifying a more fail-safe, cost-effective way to protect the hospital’s data.
Some days the biggest successes are not what went right but what didn’t go wrong. We seldom run up and down the halls clicking our heels and joyously announcing what DIDN’T happen today! So I’m tipping my hat to all the hard-working IT folks out there…the technicians, the clinicians, the informaticists, the systems analysts and administrators, and the health IT leadership who often celebrate some of their best work in silence….with just the comforting hum of systems running as they should.
Having been part of those health IT teams at Johns Hopkins, MedStar Health and Peninsula Regional Medical Center, I will always have immense respect for the work and the value these professionals bring to healthcare delivery. Now, I’m excited to join Voalte as Chief Operating Officer. It’s an interesting new challenge that appealed to me because Voalte is dedicated to making a real difference in healthcare. Moreover, we are doing it in an innovative way and providing a solution that clinicians want and actually enjoy using. By facilitating communication between caregivers, we hope to speed and improve the health process for patients. Through the creativity and innovative problem-solving of passionate and talented people, we will improve healthcare.
The healthcare industry is so enormous and the landscape is so complex, I believe the real transformation will come from the incremental contributions of companies like Voalte, which believe there is a better way to use technology and make it work for caregivers—not the other way around. So as we work with our customers to improve their communication and implement a new solution, we will work with the health IT teams to make this happen. As we reflect on the value of health IT this week, my “shout out” is to them for their hard work and contributions. My hat is off to all of you!