[02:10] What were you doing in technology 25 years ago?

I started in dot matrix printers. Laser printers had just come out and I did some font programming for them. You had to purchase an add-on font cartridge for printers back then.

[03:35] What were some other things that this generation won’t know about technology?

I came in around the time when 5.25-inch floppy drives were coming in. My first computer didn’t have a drive, so I had to boot from a separate cassette machine.

[04:30] What did you study in college back in 1989?

First of all, in high school, I took some programming classes. The first semester of college was reviewing that. We were using Pascal, which had no business purpose at all. It was just for educational purposes.

[05:16] When you graduated, were IT jobs easy to get?

No, I was 7 years behind the Y2K boom. It was a struggle. 3 weeks after college, my wife and I got married, then 3 weeks after, that I was doing a roofing job.

[08:00] What was the first technology job you landed?

I got a job at Meditech around 7 months after school, and I haven’t left healthcare since. I’ve always been in healthcare technology.

[08:49] How many end users do you have in your current position?

Roughly 525 including providers, physicians, and nurse practitioners. We have 7 locations now. I came from Life Span before this and there were 1500 end users, so it’s a little easier to grasp things here.

[09:30] Do you have a team?

We have around 12 people in the department, and we take care of the help desk. We run a lot of zero clients, and we run mostly off of laptops. We do have a small engineering team for networks, servers, and telecoms. Also, application support to support health records and HR.

[10:45] Do you think 15 years ago you would have had the same size of team that you do now?

When I came on board, we had around 21 people. Due to COVID and downsizing, we became a smaller team. The job of the IT team is going more towards supporting the business differently, not just maintaining technology. We want to shift the risk of having a data server in-house and having outages. We are concerned with delivering solutions and data to providers at all times.

[15:00] I have always wondered if a long outage would correlate with deaths.

You hear the horror stories of nurses having to do 4 hours of manual respiration of a patient. Fortunately for our business, we are mostly outpatients and not critical care, but you don’t want to miss things. We remotely monitor diabetics and hypertensives, etc.

[16:15] How does remote monitoring work?

A lot of the actual monitoring equipment is outsourced, but the data comes to us and can be analyzed. If there are problems, appointments can be made right away, and it keeps people out of hospitals.

[17:20] What did you do during the pandemic to become more efficient?

One of the initial objectives was to identify a telemedicine solution. It took around 3 weeks to implement. At the beginning of lockdown, Medicare didn’t reimburse for telemedicine, but that changed pretty quickly.

[19:45] What did you do for fun before the internet?

From around 7 to my senior year in high school, I played baseball almost every day.

[21:06] How far away were you from a phone?

We were usually in the backyard, but sometimes a 20-minute bike ride away.

[23:45] How does the bureaucracy side of things work over there?

The company is owned by providers; roughly 45-50 shareholders.

[25:22] How are IT decisions made there?

We hold meetings with the strategic committee and the finance committee.

[28:00] When did you realize you need to learn business speak and what advice do you have for people?

I realized this early on in my career. When I joined Compass, I put a 5-year plan together and I found that it was essential to listen to people and find out their needs.

[30:35] What was the thing you found most antiquated going into or coming out of COVID?

The idea of working from home worried people, but we already had the equipment and systems. The fear of what would happen when something went wrong was very prevalent.