Q&A with CIO Jamie Nelson, Part 2: “It Almost Feels Like Another Industrial Revolution.”

Change doesn’t happen overnight.

We’ve heard it numerous times, and for good reason. In the past year, however, some have learned that the old adage doesn’t always hold up.

For example, at the Hospital for Special Surgery, which is located in the heart of Manhattan, there was a request to implement a color-coding system within Epic to identify whether a patient had tested positive or negative for Covid, or was awaiting test results. “That was on a Sunday; it was in production Monday evening,” said Jamie Nelson. “It literally happened overnight.”

Despite everything that was going on — or perhaps, because of it — her team was able to make quick decisions and implement solutions almost immediately, and as CIO, she couldn’t be more proud. During a recent interview, Nelson reflected on how the entire organization was able to come together and respond to an unprecedented situation, and shared some of the key lessons learned. She also talked about her team’s plans for 2021, much of which focuses on digital health, and the important work they’re doing to promote diversity and inclusion.

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Key Takeaways



* During the pandemic, it wasn’t just clinicians, but also IT workers who “stepped out of their roles” through tasks such as staffing the incident command center.

* One of the upsides of Covid? The “ability to focus on what happens and get things done,” and to work on “purpose-driven initiatives.”

* Although capital is limited as a result of cancelled surgeries, HSS is still moving forward with its digital health strategy.

* Regardless of how many accolades an organization has compiled, “we have to earn every single patient and make their digital experience more customer-friendly.”

* When it comes to promoting diversity and inclusion, Nelson believes the key is in building a stronger pipeline, which HSS hopes to accomplish through “winterships.”





Q&A with Jamie Nelson, Part 2 [Click here to view part 1]

Gamble:  Is that something you saw with IT, in terms of a willingness to take on different roles and step out of what they had become accustomed to?

Nelson:  Yes. We had people who had to be onsite during the pandemic when it was very frightening. As a leader, I was there. We have people on our desktop team who deal with Epic to make sure the patient boards were correct, and so we had a lot of brave IT people who came into the hospital during this very scary time. We run the hospital’s incident command center, so we helped staff that seven days a week; they wanted IT representatives there so in case something wasn’t working. I was part of the executive leadership team managing this whole crisis, and I can tell you that people definitely stepped out of their roles.

The interesting thing is how quickly decisions were made and how quickly we were able to implement things. One of my favorite stories happened when I was at the hospital on a Sunday. One of our surgeons came up to me said, we need to have some sort of color coding in Epic to determine whether a patient is Covid positive, Covid pending, or Covid negative. That was a Sunday afternoon; it was in production Monday evening. If you’ve ever worked in a hospital IT department, you know that this isn’t typical. You have committee A, committee B, etc. You have to test it, and if somebody likes it, someone else isn’t going to like it.