Week 2

By Rachel Liao:

This week's class session and exercise continued to add to our building knowledge about health informatics management.  Presentations about the CIO and the IT/IS shop were informative and impressed me with the various, creative ways that our cohort's teams chose to approach and present their findings about the same topic.  I appreciate this opportunity to practice our presentation skills and receive constructive feedback, because the program truly is a safe place to practice these transferable skills.

In addition, I also wanted to comment about how I realized the main theme of this particular class session (and perhaps this class) is: lifelong learning.  We spent an hour of time talking about why Dave chose to so loosely structure the course and his expectations of our Population Health Management and Health Informatics Management classes.  No matter the path we each individually choose within healthcare administration, we will continue to learn and grow both professionally and personally as people-- and there will usually not always be a clear roadmap for doing so.  Along the same lines, as we reviewed Team Clallam's presentation about the ideal made-up CIO candidate, Ozette T. Clallam's resume, it hit me that senior leaders in healthcare also never stop growing and trying new things.

This was a bit of a personal reflection for me, as I have been thinking about my personal growth a good deal recently with my summer internship experience at Seattle Children's Hospital, applying and interviewing for fellowships back home, and beginning this new year with a fresh start.    

Moving onto new material, we began thinking about the steps to implementation of an electronic health records system.  This topic is rather interesting to me, because we talk about it like this shift is a simple, task that healthcare organizations will inevitably need to check off a to-do list to keep up with changing needs of the healthcare environment.  However, implementing and maintaining an E.H.R. system is a formidable investment and challenge for any healthcare organization.  Considerable work goes into first determining what the health system's IT/IS needs are before selecting a vendor, budgeting the project, ensuring that the organization's leaders are ready and invested in leading and managing the change.  Furthermore, these major projects are disruptive to current state clinical workflow, so leadership will need to carefully consider both the intended and unintended consequences of adopting an E.H.R.