Whether you’ve been tasked with taking a health IT system into overdrive or treating patients, or some combination of the two, a whole new raft of challenges has been added to the portfolio.

For Scott MacLean, chief information officer at MedStar Health in Baltimore, the task of leadership and navigating through a pandemic has been done largely from his desk.

At HIMSS21, MacLean will draw on his experiences connecting with, encouraging, and working for ways to support his team in an era when how we meet and work is undergoing a seismic shift.

He'll discuss principles for retaining talent, maintaining budgets, providing agile leadership, serving customers, running operations and managing vendors – all during a time of disruption and dislocation.

Used to working on-premises with network drive software, MacLean’s team had to find ways to get people working remotely the tools they needed. He says a combination of investing in platforms like Citrix to host applications as well as training staff on how to share files on remote drives helped keep a dispersed team operating efficiently.

"Beefing up our VPN and Citrix capabilities allowed people to work the way they were most productive," he says. "We made investments in technology, PPE and traveling nurses. By the same token, we tried to structure our [software] contracts for concurrent usage or service contracts."

While having the technical assets for success, the toll of a sudden shift in work styles and its impact on people was another management challenge.

"I was used to going into conference rooms," says MacLean, who felt that the shift to distanced work was much more impersonal. He says the all-hands-on-deck approach to COVID-19 meant pushing off other projects and led to a tunnel vision effect.

"It was so singular it was somewhat boring," he says.

"We didn’t have relief," says MacLean. "Nobody was travelling. We tried to do some rotations of days off or comp days. It went on much longer than people expected."

In an effort to bridge the gap of remote work, MacLean says he decided to call every leader who managed another person and to connect with them. He says that reaching out and trying to regain a human element helped encourage his team and helped him figure out how to adapt his own management practices.

"I think anyone who participated in this pandemic should be proud of how we responded to this," he said. "We really came together and did a lot of work to support the population."

MacLean will offer more detail in his presentation, "Read the Zoom: Leadership in a Time of Virtual Disruption." It's scheduled for Wednesday, August 11, from 1:15-2:15 p.m. in Venetian Murano 3201.