A bevy of "young bloods" in health IT are taking on more responsibility and making more enterprise-level decisions, Health Data Management notes in a special report recognizing five under-35 clinicians, administrators and IT staff.
Among them, 29-year-old Michael Dozier, regional information officer at Southeast Health in Cape Girardeau, Mo., tells the publication he's "constantly battling the age thing."
The 266-bed hospital is replacing an 18-year-old legacy system with an integrated suite of clinical and financial applications, deploying an ambulatory EHR and a financial management system. The hospital is going in on the software in a joint contract with Missouri Delta Medical Center, a former competitor. "The two health systems figured they could save millions on a joint contract-and a jointly run data center behind it," Health Data Management reports.
Dozier is in charge of the deployment, standardizing workflows across the organizations, for example. "I do a lot of rounding, meeting with the departments, discussing workflow changes, trying to adopt what's good," he tells the publication. "It's constant change management."
Other young IT professionals highlighted in the special report include: 34-year-old John Showalter, M.D., chief medical information officer at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson; 28-year-old Patrick Murfee, CIO at Hemphill County Hospital, Canadian, Texas; 33-year-old Paul Anspach, integration architect at McLaren Northern Michigan in Petoskey, Mich.; and 29-year-old Elizabeth Kerch, Epic applications manager at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City.
Each of the "young bloods" submitted a statement about their vision for the future of Health IT.
"I envision a world of healthcare IT where technology is fully exploited to improve the quality of healthcare that is delivered," said Kerch. "I look forward to a day when patients can easily interact with their healthcare information online, providers across healthcare entities can access one unified patient health record, and researchers can take advantage of having a plethora of healthcare data at their disposal."
To learn more:
- check out the profiles of all five of Health Data Management's "young bloods"