About Automating Healthcare

Automating Healthcare shares the experiences of one small team of developers, database administrators and analysts at a Boston-area health care organization, as they help the business improve quality, cost and overall efficiency by automating processes.

The author
Steve Carter () has worked in a management role at various health care organizations in the Boston, Massachusetts area for over 30 years. Most of his experience is in operations, with an increasing focus on using technology to improve operations. Most recently, he officially moved to the information technology department. He has managed a wide range of functions, including:

• Community hospital — safety, campus police, transportation, telecommunications, biomedical, workers compensation
• Large ambulatory group — operations analysis & reporting, patient satisfaction surveys, internal benchmarking, health center operations, intranet/Internet, desktop computer support, provider enrollment, purchasing
• Integrated delivery system — intranet/Internet, operations analysis & reporting

The team
Everyone in the group has worked together on this project pretty much from the beginning. Even before this project, Joe, Peggy and Janet have been colleagues for much of their careers. The group currently includes:

• Joe — senior Internet applications developer with nearly 25 years experience in both enterprise and dot-com environments. Joe has developed intranet applications supporting a wide variety of functions, but his primary focus for the past 2-3 years has been applications directly supporting patient care.
• Peggy — senior Internet applications developer with over 25 years experience in enterprise environments. Peggy has developed a number of applications for the intranet, although her primary role is the care and feeding of the intranet. She is the primary gatekeeper for structure, organization, style, and content management.
• Janet — senior Internet applications developer with nearly 25 years experience in enterprise environments. Janet has developed intranet applications supporting a wide variety of functions. Much of her work revolves around worker issues, including HR requests, non-employee management, security badges requests, etc.
• Bill — database administrator with 12 years experience working for a vendor and at hospitals as a programmer, report writer, systems analyst, and most recently DBA with enterprise-wide responsibility for SQL Server.
• Astrid — manager of business analytics for the past six years, in a very interesting hybrid model where she directs analysts in both IT and QM. The combined team of IT and QM analysts are physically located together in IT, and Astrid reports directly to Steve in IT with a dotted line to the VP Quality. Astrid also provides enterprise-wide, informal leadership for all analysts, to ensure best practices are used by analysts in all departments.