Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/479065
63 Leadership & Management In my role, I had to make sure resources — both funding and personnel — were available to get the job done and make sure we were using our resources wisely. Obviously, we started out with a budget and we had to do a lot of work around the funding of the initiative, securing it first of all, but then monitoring the spending as well. I also served as leadership support, helping with organi- zational communication and awareness, facilitat- ing decisions about what kind of technology we could use in the building and making sure I set the expectations of what will be in the hospital for my peers and C-level executives around the table. Also, a particular mission we had with this hospi- tal — as you would have with any advanced hos- pital — was making sure we were making tech- nology decisions for the future, and that was hard. We had been working on this hospital for roughly six years and trying to predict that many years ago what technology was going to be available by the time the hospital opened was a little dicey. So our team had to envision the future of technology so we would plan the right things for a building like the New James, which needs to open with the lat- est and greatest technology to help cure cancer. Q: In the days, weeks and months leading up to the launch, what was your biggest source of anxiety? PT: I think for me, my biggest source of anxiety was managing the people who were involved and help- ing them so they wouldn't get totally fried. With this type of effort, we really had to watch the amount of hours they were working and the amount of stress it was putting on their lives. We had to make sure people were getting some time off, at least week- ends, which they didn't even always get leading up to the launch. We had to make sure we were taking care of the people doing all the work. I'm not the one hooking up cables or programming any sys- tems, so the boots on the ground needed someone to help them and watch over them. We have this wonderful staff with mountains of work so I had to always ask, "How can I help them?" Also, tactically, we had a couple of pieces of brand new technology that we had to make some big calls on. For instance, one of the decisions that was a little anxiety-ridden was making the call a couple of years ago to not include coaxial cables — like regular cables in your house — into this hospital to deliver TV. We think we are the only hospital in the country to be delivering IPTV, which is like TV over your computer connection, not coaxial cable. We had to make that decision a year and a half ago, and then we had to make it work or we wouldn't have TVs in the patient rooms. In retrospect, it was a great decision be- cause the TVs are really nice and we saved a lot of money, but it could have been a problem if our team hadn't made it work. Q: How did you manage to juggle so many tasks? What was your process? PT: I was fortunate to have a couple of talented staff members for whom that project was their whole focus. Several project managers lived, ate and breathed the project for years, and by the time we went live, there were a lot of staff members dedicating their whole time to that project. For us to stay abreast with what was going on and ensure we were being responsive, we had to make sure that when things came up, we handled them right away or by the deadline. Most of the things that would come up with this project became some of our highest priorities. We also had to make sure we were staying ahead when it came to resource needs, so that when we got to whatever stage of the project, we had the right resources and per- sonnel for it. While the staff was putting out fires on a day- to-day basis, my role included having regular touch bases to make sure we were always in- formed and were asking them what they need- ed to solve problems. We had regular status meetings on the calendar with the team so they could bring forth barriers or issues to our lead- ership team, and we could help solve them. You really need to have those regular touch points with different factions of the team and the dif- ferent executives. Q: What are some of the other exciting health IT features of the New James? PT: One of the modules now available from Epic is deployed to patients on a tablet. If it's medi- cally appropriate, patients of the New James are offered a tablet when they are admitted. On it, they can do two categories of things: they can interact with their EMR and caregivers and they can connect to the Internet through a private Wi-Fi network. Things patients can do include ordering food appropriate to their diet, seeing a portion of their charts and results, sending non-urgent notes to the nursing staff, reviewing pictures of their caregivers and taking notes on physician directions, questions they have or any- thing else they want to write down. For patients who aren't tech adept or are too sick, we have a proxy service in which the patients' caregivers can also use the system on the tablets. Q: When overseeing the entire health IT go-live, what was the biggest challenge (or challenges) you ran into? PT: Our entire patient care complex is roughly 4 million square feet and we added 1.1 million, so our whole hospital increased by roughly 25 percent. The hospital is 21 floors, which is now the tallest building on the campus, and when you think about the sheer size of it and the miles and miles and miles of cable in that building, it's daunting. We decided to have a PC in every inpatient room for nurses and physicians, and any time we had to work on those computers, it would take two days to walk the building and get to every room. The sheer size of the building, the number of rooms and the density of technol- ogy in a modern hospital like the New James is incredible. This was also the first time OSU built an inpatient hospital since the advent of mod- ern technology, so coordinating everything to be ready on the same day — rather than imple- menting everything over several years — was challenging.