When Covid-19 cases emerged in the U.S., the University of Alabama at Birmingham Health System had to pause any projects that were not related to pandemic response and shift employees to a remote work environment.
These moves have set up a busy 2021 for the system, said CIO Joan Hicks, in a phone interview. Hicks spoke with MedCity News about the pending IT projects her team plans to complete this upcoming year, and how working from home has affected her team and the IT talent pool in Alabama.
Note: Responses were edited for length and clarity.
Question: What are your top IT priorities for 2021?
Joan Hicks: We already have several very, very large projects, enterprise-wide, that we have been trying to complete. We’re replacing our nurse call system, which means we have to get in every room. But when you’re running at 96% to 98% to 102% occupancy [due to the pandemic] — that really slowed us down because we couldn’t [always] get in those rooms.
We’re also implementing our electronic intensive care unit project, and this [involves] building out a lot of our step-down rooms.
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So that is kind of one category of ongoing large projects that were in progress when Covid-19 hit. So, we’re finishing those up.
For 2021, we’ve got to replace our master patient index. The product that we’re using we’ve used for almost 20 years now and that particular product has served us well. We’ve always had a master patient index that fits on top of all of our systems, [which serves as an] air traffic controller for medical record numbers.
And then, in addition to that, it’s time to redo our business continuity plan, our disaster recovery plan and our downtime plans, including drills with all of those.
I’m sure you’ve seen how many hospitals have suffered from ransomware attacks and increased phishing. I have just so much disdain for any of those criminals, and they are criminals, that are out there attacking with intent healthcare systems during this time. So, it really made us aware that it’s time for us to revisit our business continuity plan, disaster recovery plan and our downtime plan, and drill accordingly.
Question: What factors will drive your IT decision-making process in 2021? And will it differ from how you were making decisions last year?
Joan Hicks: Yes, it will be different. Obviously, the pandemic has had a huge influence on how we make decisions.
We very quickly supported the movement to work from home — we had about 6,000 employees working from home within a 72-hour period. I will tell you that was probably…the roughest [time period] that I have experienced, probably since some of our big go-lives many decades ago. So yes, it’s definitely influenced our decision-making.
The remote workforce has made it where we can recruit people from other states, and they can stay in their other state and work here in Alabama. However, the folks in Alabama [also] have the benefit of living here, with the lower cost of living, but they can get work in other states that have much higher wages.
So, it’s the best of both worlds, but we are [also] losing folks to working full-time at home, to working in other states. That’s something we’ve not had to deal with as much. So, [in terms of] just being able to find certain types of skillsets, we’re more resource-constrained than we’ve been in a number of years.
Question: What are some opportunities and challenges of integrating IT into the vaccine rollout process?
Joan Hicks: We actually implemented some projects that we had on our pending list. One of those is a product for online, mobile check-ins. We were rolling that out, but we had not done the integration between that mobile application and our scheduling and registration system that then integrates with our clinical EHR. You could check-in, but we had not moved it up to the scheduling process.
So, in the course of a little over 24 hours, the vendor worked with us and we were able to allow patients eligible for Covid-19 vaccination to check-in through this mobile app that puts them in the registration system, and then links them to their EMR so we can do the documentation.
That’s one of those opportunities — could have been a challenge, but it turned out to be okay. So, I’m really excited about that.
Question: Are there any other specific hurdles you are preparing for regarding the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic? If yes, what are they and how are you preparing?
Joan Hicks: Well, one of the hurdles — that I hope has passed for the most part — is keeping our staff healthy. We’ve been very, very fortunate, even though about a third of our IT staff are always onsite.
Another hurdle is really supporting that workforce at home. Not just our staff, but all of the other staff in the organization and making sure that our connections, and their connections, are secure.
This is one of the areas where I think that we have not done a good job, that is, preparing our staff to be self-sufficient or semi self-sufficient at home. Things that our help desk, our desktop support guys, go out and help you with when you’re in your office — now that you are at home, what are you going to do? And so that’s been a real hurdle for us.
Also, the amount of time those calls to the help desk take has increased. So, I’m making sure that I’ve got enough people working the help desk to adequately support sites at home. Hopefully, when the pandemic subsides, we can at least offer some IT classes.
We very hurriedly distributed equipment for folks to carry home. We’ve got folks using some rather old equipment, so we will need to change that out and get more modern equipment for them. We’ll have to figure out how we can schedule that and do the drive-by drop-off that we’ve supported in the past.
One thing that I didn’t really see coming was that we have had staff members who do not want to work full time at home. They really miss the comradery, that sense of family they have at the workplace. So, we’re working on curtailing areas for them to come in and have their team meetings, so they don’t lose that sense of connection to the other staff.
We usually don’t think of IT people as people-people, but they actually are people-people. I want to try to be more aware than I have been of making sure that their social needs are met.
Photo: elenabs, Getty Images, UAB Health System
