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 LEAD IT Profile - Cathy Viets
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2010 – Vol. II
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E-mail article
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Supervisor, Enterprise Operations > North Kansas City Hospital
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Increasingly there's a blurring of the lines that were once drawn in IT departments. What does a good IT leader do to drive collaboration?
I wish I had the answer to this – I would take on a consulting job and travel the country teaching it to all IT departments! Currently we're in the process of forming a "Change Management" team, and this is one of the things the hospital's Enterprise Operations Director and I will be focusing on in the next quarter.
Describe some of your department's recent advancements with process improvements, better efficiencies, etc.
We recently implemented a huge IT process improvement. I have a small staff of nine to support all computer and printer repairs, as well as various handheld devices, Tier 1 level support for most software, and leased PC replacements. As we looked at our first-quarter leasing replacement schedule, we saw that we needed to replace approximately 50 PCs/laptops per week. We implemented the PDS Rack N Roll System, and this has been the saving grace for us.
Within your IT organization, what's your team doing to avoid getting caught up in the day-to-day trench warfare of product support and purely reactive approach?
The one thing we do to minimize this is to have weekly proactive floor reviews. My team has assignments in each clinical area of the hospital, and each week they take a pass through the area touching as many devices as they can to look for any obvious issues (broken keys on laptops, software launching slowly, etc.). This has helped cut down on some of those urgent calls.
When you're called upon to explain the importance of technology within healthcare, what examples or human-interest stories do you refer to?
I like to put the staff in the place of the patient being served at the hospital. How would they feel if they were sitting in the emergency room as a patient, waiting to find out if their leg was fractured or to learn the results of a lab test, and to have that delayed because of technology? What if the clinician called us for help and we didn't respond in a timely manner, leaving the patient to sit and wait and agonize over a diagnosis? Support of healthcare technology is an immediate need, and I have a great team that shares this feeling.
What did your parents teach you that helps you in your career today?
My parents were not the type to teach us (I'm the oldest of five children) life lessons. Ironically, this probably taught me the most important lesson anyone can learn: What you make of your life is strictly up to you – and no one else!
As an IT supervisor, what do you do to self-educate?
Listening to my team, the issues they encounter each day, and the resolution of these issues always provides a learning opportunity. And there probably isn't a day that I'm not searching the Web for answers to some challenge we're facing.
If you could immediately impact the world to be a better place, where would you start?
With the problems in our economy today, I would love to see everyone get a "do-over." Wipe the slate clean, have all the debt paid off, and we all start over. I know, that's such a crazy idea – but wouldn't it be incredible?
What's your poison when it comes to personal technology?
This is going to be probably the strangest response you've had to this question, but … I'm totally into the latest and greatest sewing machines. And, yes, in this day, sewing is a technology. I now have a computerized embroidery/sewing machine that allows me to connect via my computer to download patterns, as well as use my digitizer program to turn photos and drawings into embroidery.
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