Nursing Backgrounds Give Digital Leaders Valuable Perspective

By Candace Stuart

Liz Johnson, Theresa Meadows, Nicole Kerkenbush and Anika Gardenhire entered careers in health IT with backgrounds in nursing. Glenn Hilburn took a different path, moving from marketing and computer sciences to being a registered nurse, to working in a healthcare IT company and now serving as an IT executive in a health system. Whichever pathway, their training and experiences as nurses have positioned them to excel as digital healthcare leaders.

Nursing requires attributes that are easily transferable to health IT. Nurses have a big-picture view, a desire to help, a disciplined approach to problem-solving, well-honed people skills and a patient-centered perspective – all valuable skills in a healthcare IT executive.

“The nursing career is built on a holistic view of the patient, looking at the patient across the whole continuum of their life and not just looking at one single episode of an acute problem,” says Johnson, who recently retired as chief innovation officer at Tenet Healthcare. “The nurse also sees all the other clinicians and what they contribute, whether radiology or social work or physical therapy or whatever. They all have a significant contribution to where we get to in the end.”

The profession draws people who want to help others, notes Meadows, senior vice president and CIO at Cook Children’s Health Care System. “When I chose a career in nursing it was because I wanted to help people and make people’s lives better,” she says. “For me, it is in every decision I make. If we are having discussions about hardware, then how is that hardware going to be used by a nurse or a doctor or an ancillary person? Is this going to help or hurt them in their job?”

Nurses have been trained to apply a methodical approach to problem solving that works well in healthcare analytics, observes Kerkenbush, chief nursing and performance officer at Monument Health. “We learn in nursing school to assess a patient situation, to diagnose, to put together a plan, to implement that plan and then evaluate,” she says. “I often find myself going back to this when I am dealing with staffing, or when people want to get some information from the data analytics team and they need a report, or a problem around a process or improvement we want to employ.”

In an inpatient setting, nurses tend to have the most contact with patients and their families, which gives them a patient- and family-centered perspective, says Hilburn, vice president of information services at Grady Health System. “We understand the impact on the patient and caregivers,” he says. “Every decision we make has their viewpoint in mind.”

Nurses are often dealing with patients and families at a stressful time in their lives, too, which requires deft people skills. Gardenhire, assistant vice president of digital transformation at Intermountain Healthcare and a former intensive care clinical nurse manager, adds that experience has prepared her to be calm when faced with a trying situation and stay keenly focused on patients’ well-being. “I understand the priorities and those priorities for me are always from the perspective of the patient,” she says. “When you have the opportunity to be in an empathetic moment, when you have been the one who has held someone’s hand during the death and dying process, when you understand what it is for a family member who can’t get to the bedside before they will lose someone, and the opportunity for technology to support closure for a human being and their relationship, it makes a difference in how you prioritize your work, how you interact with your team, and also how you respond to a crisis.”

The realization that technology could amplify what they offered as nurses often is the catalyst for a career change, they noted. “The sole reason I went into nursing was the instant gratification I could receive at the bedside, caring for the patient and having an impact on human life. But what I realized very quickly was that I was broadening the scale by leading the healthcare industry through the transition to informatics and digital health, and how that could fundamentally shift what we were doing for our patients and their loved ones.”

In honor of the 200^th anniversary of the birth of nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale, the World Health Organization (WHO) has designated 2020 the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife. In their State of the World’s Nursing 2020 report, they emphasize that digital technology is playing an increasingly important role in nursing education and practice. Nurses who boast digital expertise are well positioned to advance health and care, both from the bedside or – like these five leaders have shown – from the executive suite.

Take the Survey >