Linda Reed is that rare breed, a health care I.T. pro who's also a registered nurse. As CIO for two-hospital Atlantic Health, Morristown, N.J., she's overseeing the implementation of computerized physician order entry. After starting her nursing career at another hospital system, she was "tricked" into transferring into its I.T. department temporarily...for 16 years. She joined Atlantic Health in 2004.
On Building Credibility
Being an R.N. gives me more credibility with the docs because they're all about patient care. Because I'm a clinical person, they don't have to interpret the acronyms for me, and they just assume I have the technical smarts I need. But I.T. today is really relationship building. When you're a nurse, you're peacemaker to the world, and an air traffic controller - all at once. It's great background for a CIO.
On Delegating Ownership
You have to give your clinical customers some power. We had a nice timeline set for putting in bar-coded medication administration, and the first couple of pilots showed us where the flaws were. The users were building up their defenses. We pushed it back six months and the users took total responsibility. The rest of the units just flew.
On Avoiding Alert Overload
When we started CPOE, we looked at the spectacular failures. Many had to do with the barrage of alerts that hit the doctors. We turned almost all alerts off. We'll turn them on again little by little. They'll be customized by hospital. Clinicians will decide which ones they want.
On Playing Percentages
Rather than talking about the percentage of doctors using our CPOE system, Ilike to talk about the proportion of orders entered electronically. One doc might be responsible for 30% of a particular order. If we add 50 more doctors to the system, they might account for 90% of the orders. If a doc only enters one or two orders a month, he_s going to be the one calling tech support all the time because he's forgotten his password. I'd rather get the high-volume docs on board.
On Integration vs. Best-of-Breed
We bought our obstetrics department a stand-alone EMR, and the department went from all manual to all-electronic almost overnight. The stand-alone system (from PeriGen) had tons of clinical decision support. It was a better product than our HIS vendor (McKesson) had at the time. But we had to be
clear with the OBs about what they would be losing by not having integration. We have found that great clinical content holds up for about two years, and then you start to hear whining about lack of integration.
THE REED FILE
* Former CIO at Virtua Health, Marlton, N.J.
* MSN, Pace University, Peekskill, N.Y.
* MBA, Widener University, Chester, Pa.
* Bilingual, English and Spanish.
For the complete interview, go to HealthDataManagement.com
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