Hello, I'm Jessica and welcome to the lecture. During this lecture, we will specifically discuss what makes working in Health IT, so unique in the healthcare system. While we cover throughout this lecture, we'll begin by discussing why Health IT is unique from other fields. What is unique about working in Health IT? We'll conclude with how the Health IT role integrates into health care. To begin, we'll start by reviewing the complexity of Health IT. Some of you may be familiar with your primary care doctor's office. Common association when thinking about a healthcare organization. As you can see from this diagram, the complexity far reaches the individual, their provider, and their care team. Data from the individual may be used at higher levels of aggregation, and conclusions from those higher levels can impact back to the specific individual. We can see that in this diagram, if we read from left to right, we see we're starting with an individual person, and moving to over to larger groups, and then back to the individual, note this cycle. What's unique about working in Health IT versus other fields? It's really great question, and there's really three key components to answer us. One must be able to prioritize and triage problem tickets quickly. Tickets can be a matter of life and death, we must be able to maintain calm under pressure, it's key and speaking with front line clinicians. Whose clinicians need Health IT support in order to troubleshoot and resolve issues effectively and quickly. One must be able to navigate the nuances of healthcare terminology that can allow for effective communication. If we wonder what would go into the daily role of working in Healthcare IT, and what the scope of that would look like, if we look at the high volume of requests, we'll see a sample month here. How busy would we be if we chose Health IT? Let's take, for example, June of 2020, the average number of incidents per day was roughly 596, that's a single business day. If we look at the monthly total, we're just under 18,000 total incidents. What does this mean? There are variables such as depending on the size of the health care organization, but like many organizations, health care moves quickly. How many analysts are staff to the healthcare IT help Desk? Would you have an area of expertise? All of these factors can play into these averages. It's safe to say that if you were to work for an IT help desk and healthcare organization, you would be quite busy. If we look at the top incidents, enterprise-wide, we see again an example of June. When we say enterprise-wide, we mean across the healthcare system as a whole. Some healthcare systems have a single facility, other healthcare organizations have numerous facilities across multiple cities and sometimes even multiple states. The help desk will typically take calls from each facility, which becomes an enterprise. The top reported issue were related to Jed. What does this mean? If you were, I want to work for a healthcare organization, regardless of our role, we would be provided a Jed, that's our personal identifier. Which is also how we sign into any software applications or any other applications that are required for our jobs. If we missed a window for a password reset or we forgot our password, those could be two reasons that we would look at help desk to get specific to our Jed. We can also see that the second highest reported issue pertains to Outlook e-mail exchange. Outlook e-mail can impact multiple users across the enterprise. This is why it's essential if an email issue is identified to be reported. Most likely, the individual reporting the issue is not the only individual experiencing the issue. Now if we look at a breakdown of 10 subcategories, again, within the month of June, we see that we've further drilled down to more specific issues. A few to know, function or feature is not working, this could be a software system, a login failure perhaps we forgot our password or again, we missed our window to reset our password or a hardware failure. We're fortunate throughout the course to be joined by Linisha Ramsey when she was in high school, Linisha plan to become a cosmetologist. Her first job was actually at Taco Bell. After graduating from high school, she worked in a salon. Never imagined that should be working at Johns Hopkins or even in technology. She first interviewed for a role at Hopkins when she was 18 years old. She landed a position as an IT Help Desk Agent and has moved up over the years, and now is an IT Help Desk Manager leading a team of 30 other individuals. At this time, Linisha shares with us some of the most common IT issues her team helps troubleshoot. Listen in to get a perspective on the types of tickets you too might someday be helping to close, if you work in Health IT Support. Common IT issues that are reported to us are related to log in or access issues of people being locked up in their accounts needing a password reset, multi-factor authentication issues, which is a newer technology and has been put in place to help make things more secure. Folks tend to sometimes be challenged with getting that set up and Outlook access issue. We'll hear more from Linisha throughout each of the courses. She'll share with us examples of tickets she's been proud of handling, calls that if bit difficult. What it's like to troubleshoot network outages, support clinicians having VPN access issues and more. We know that like Lisha's experience, you'll gain inspiration from Linisha's as well.
