Edith Dees, President & CEO, CAPSYN (Former CIO), Chapter 3

Is change really so bad? Can implementing a new system really shake a staff to its core, paralyzing the ability to provide the best care? Yes, and that’s why it has to be handled with extreme care, says Edith Dees. Of all the lessons she learned during her two decades as CIO, the most valuable was how to effectively introduce and manage change. In this interview, Dees reflects on her experiences — not just as an IT leader, but as a clinician and consultant — and shares how she was able to conquer some of the biggest roadblocks in advancing an organization. She also talks about what excites her most in today’s industry, why she made to the move to consulting, and the direction she believes the CIO will take.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3



* The workflow gap — “These are things we can address and fix.”

* Importance of soft skills

* Security & the challenge with “human engineering.”

* Back to consulting — “It was the next step.”

* CIO as collaborator

* “Clinicians can’t opt out of discussions.”

* The most “exciting” trends in health IT



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Bold Statements

It’s not, ‘put a stop to Meaningful Use. Stop the rollout.’ We need to look at some of the soft skills and listen. Set up some integration mechanisms so we can better appreciate the bigger picture here — what’s going on and what’s our role in it? What’s your individual role? I think that’s been neglected.

It’s a matter of saying, ‘I’m not doing anything that’s counter to your mission. We all have the same mission. I just have things I’m responsible for doing and you have things you’re responsible for doing. Together, let’s work through this and accomplish what needs to be accomplished and move on.’

A big part of my role as a CEO, and I think it will be continuing to be going forward, is clarifying your role and your colleague’s role — who does what, so there are no gaps and there is ownership and accountability. The ball is not dropped

You’ve got to sell a vision and you got to tell people how they contribute to it. And a lot of that is talking to your colleagues and negotiating with them, because they would much rather keep doing what they’ve always done and not think about the stuff that you live and breathe every day — how is this project going to get done, how are we going to stay in budget?

It’s going to be a real crisis if we don’t automate the stuff that we have clinicians worrying about now. Free them up to do the hands-on work, not chase things and say, ‘I know I charted it somewhere, where is it?’ Let’s get way past that.

Gamble:  In your current role, what are you seeing as the biggest challenges for CIOs and other leaders?

Dees:  The immediate word that comes to mind is workflow. When I was a bedside critical care nurse, I was just thinking the interaction and relationship between the patient and their family. That was it. I notice this a lot with clinicians, and I think that’s one of the big dissatisfiers — they don’t really understand that they have a workflow, and they don’t like the system not supporting their current workflow.

I think a lot of work needs to be done saying, ‘you do have a workflow — let’s understand it.’ My observation of nurses in particular is if you don’t deliberately tell them in their workflow to stop doing this, they’re overwhelmed, because they’re going to do everything they did in their prior workflow and everything you expect to support the system in their new workflow,