Best Hospital IT 2016: #4 Medium Hospital
Kennedy Health System, New Jersey
IT Staff: 68
Overall Score: 62.63%

Job burnout is a cautionary factor for managers in every health system department, but the difference with IT staff is that no one else notices. That’s because IT often works behind the scenes to keep everything running and the long hours they put in are often in late-night obscurity.

Tammy Curren, vice president of information systems at Kennedy Health System in Cherry Hill, NJ, understands the burnout issue all too well – especially this year as her department is in the middle of moving its data center on top of all the other projects swirling around.

“This has been our most challenging year, with so many projects and so many directions – I am very concerned about staff burnout,” she said. “Sometimes our people are working 16-to-18-hour days to make things work seamlessly for the health system. They need to know that their efforts matter and I go out of my way to recognize them for it. When people are told you appreciate what they do at the end of a long day, it puts them on Cloud 9, even though they are exhausted.”

What makes 2016 a particularly busy year is moving the data center – not within the complex, but to another facility “a couple hours down the road” in Pennsylvania. When the 74-member department is not focused on the myriad projects they’ve got going simultaneously, they also have to find time to dismantle current infrastructure, pack it up and transport it across state lines.

The Kennedy IT team of “top notch, talented and knowledgeable people” has made great progress on the analytics front, which Curren holds up as their biggest success to date.

“Even though we’re still in the early stages, we have seen great promise come out of it in ways we had not seen before,” she said. “The sky is the limit here.”

Specifically, the department has created some analytics focused on preventing hospital readmissions, which Curren said is creating some innovative tools for staff to use on an issue that has been a challenge for hospitals across the country in the wake of Medicare readmission penalties.

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Not only do the logistics of the move create more labor on top of an already heavy workload, it also creates anxiety over security issues, Curren said. “We’re always on guard against hackers, but this transition makes us even more vulnerable,” she said. “We can’t take our eyes off it for a split second.”

Even so, Curren sees the data center transfer as an opportunity to improve its security and performance “times 10.” The health system hired a chief information security officer to add another layer of protection.

As a 20-year healthcare IT veteran, Curren says the pace of technology advancement and deployment has accelerated tremendously in the past five years.

“Keeping up with the pace has been exhausting, but exciting,” she said. “When I started as a programmer, the pace was much slower then. Healthcare was behind everyone else when it came to technology adoption. That certainly isn’t the case now because once we saw the power of IT, we all wanted to catch up overnight.”

Workplace culture was one of 87 questions senior executives (CIO, CMIOs, etc.), directors of IT, clinical and systems analysts, technicians, help desk staff and others responded to on our survey.

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