Tag Archives: Covid-19

How daily life has changed

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Whether you live in a state with strict stay at home orders from your governor or are still going about your life with few adjustments other than social distancing and more frequent hand washing, your life has changed.

You may be an essential worker reporting to your workplace each day or adapting the best you can to working from home or fearing a layoff or already out of a job at this point.

You may have elder parents living with you or other family members with health issues that make them high risk.

Regardless, your life has changed. The fears, uncertainty, anger, sadness, exhaustion, confusion, and so many other emotions and feelings are real. We all have them.

Self-care is important for all of us. As a CIO/CMIO colleague keeps telling his team, it’s a marathon not a sprint. The image I used this week is one of my favorites shared on Facebook by Brooke Anderson, a photographer in California. It’s a good reminder of how we need to take care of ourselves..

Here’s what my daily life looks like now:

  • Staying at home: My husband and I haven’t been anywhere in 2 weeks except for when I picked up takeout at a local restaurant over a week ago.
  • Working from home: Splitting time between our StarBridge Advisors business and work with a health system client on a variety of projects.
  • Exercise: Walking our two little dogs and trying to get 10K steps each day keeping appropriate social distance with all the other walkers. There is a joy in seeing the spring flowers and buds on trees change each day – gives me hope!
  • Family connection: Talking to my sister in Minnesota where I grew up and where all my three siblings and their families live. Keeping in touch with my daughters and their changed lives. One daughter is a Nurse Practitioner who will soon be caring for COVID-19 patients while her husband adapts to working full-time from home and their 3 and 5-year-old kids play together. The other daughter was already working from home; her husband is adapting to working from home while their first grader is doing the eLearning school program and their 5-year-old plays.
  • Sharing resources: It’s hard to not be in the thick of it knowing what healthcare organizations are going through and how IT teams are working hard to support them. I’m channeling that energy into supporting Bill Russell and “This Week in Health IT” with a growing number of free COVID-19 resources for health IT teams.
  • Social media with a purpose: I try to share what is most informative and useful as well as positive and motivating.
  • Managing how much news I watch: On my busiest workdays I only watch at night. On more flexible days, I get snippets mid-day. In the spirit of being positive, I will say that the leadership demonstrated by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is the leadership we need at all levels of government – fact based, informed, action oriented, and empathic.

And as the days blend together, the weekly routine now includes a couple new things. We gratefully receive grocery delivery that our nearby daughter has helped coordinate. We do a weekly family video call where the four grandkids stick their face right up to the camera and call out to their cousins then eventually go play so the six adults can talk and check in with each other. And we make a quiet moment to do Sunday online church which are YouTube messages from our ministers that we can watch anytime.

No matter what your days look like now, practice self-care. There are many resources out there to support you. The latest This Week in Health IT podcast – “Mental Wellness During Crisis” with Dana Udall PhD, Chief Clinical Officer at Ginger is definitely worth listening to.

Whatever you might fear or feel inconvenienced by during this pandemic, think about the healthcare workers who like firemen run into the burning building, not away from it. They are going to work so we can stay home. They and all the essential workers who are keeping things running are the true heroes. To them I say thank you, be safe and well. To all of you, take care of yourself and those you love. We will get through this – together.

COVID-19: Health IT collaboration and best practices

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We are an industry that shares best practices and continually learns from one another. As we all deal with uncharted territory, that sharing is needed more than ever before. In conversations with healthcare CIOs it

Message from Brigham and Women’s Hospital OR nurses: #StayHome

is obvious that the amount of work currently being undertaken by health IT teams is extraordinary.

In that spirit, this week I’m highlighting several resources that might be useful to health IT teams:

Through ThisWeekInHealthIT Bill Russell has produced valuable podcasts for health IT professionals for the past two years, interviewing healthcare executives and IT leaders across the country. Last week he pivoted to focus on COVID-19 with two new services:

COVID-19 Resources is a page dedicated to COVID-19 resources during this time. It’s a resource site for health IT teams when they are asked to stand up a relevant technology or implement a technology enabled process. Visit the page now to see what’s already been shared. And you can help him help others. Just forward any resources for health IT that you are willing to share to Bill at hello@ThisWeekinHealthIT.com

Podcast interviews with health IT leaders on the front lines of the pandemic who are willing to share some of their preparedness challenges, lessons and best practices:

COVID-19 Prep with Baptist Health KY

  • Standing on the lessons of the past
  • Protecting the care providers during COVID-19

COVID-19 Prep with Asante Health OR

  • Establishing communication in crisis
  • Preparedness huddles
  • Prioritization of IT work
  • Leadership skills needed

Continue reading →

Healthcare providers on the front lines of Covid-19

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In my blog last week, I consciously decided to avoid the Covid-19 topic. The situation was evolving day to day and I asked myself what useful insights or comments I could possibly have.

Just 11 days ago, the cancellation of HIMSS20 conference was announced. Many of us were hoping for this as we worried about being in a convention center with 45,000 people from not just around the country but around the world. With the cancellations of major sports, Broadway, closure of Disney, limits on the size of large gatherings, and school closings, the times have changed drastically in a matter of days.

We are being encouraged to practice “social distancing”. People who can are working from home.

But hospitals remain open for business as they must. Our nurses and doctors are on the front lines. IT teams and all the hospital staff who support the clinicians are doing what is necessary to ensure that they can deliver care.

While all healthcare organizations have emergency preparedness plans in place for a variety of incidents, this is uncharted territory that tests the limits of those plans. There will be much to learn and share when we get to the other side of it. But in the spirit of we’re all in this together and the culture of sharing best practices we have in healthcare, here are a few links that might be of value in the days ahead.

UW Medicine CIO’s advice: Prepping IT systems for COVID-19 – by Eric J. Neil published in Health IT News, March 12. UW Medicine was one of the first health systems on the front lines of the pandemic in the U.S. Their insight and advice are invaluable to IT leaders around the country.

While you may question the value of Twitter, it is yet another forum where lessons are being shared from the front lines. Dr. Kira Newman has worked in the ICU in Seattle the past week and posted a 10 part thread:

In one part Dr. Newman provided the link to their Covid-19 Resource Site for other hospitals to use.

17 Coronavirus (Covid-19) Actions for Healthcare CIOs – by John Lynn in Healthcare IT Today, March 11. John is continuing to collect info from IT leaders and will share as he does.

Healthcare IT News is maintaining a list of trusted resources that can be found here: Key resources to keep track of the coronavirus pandemic.

Most of my readers probably work in healthcare organizations and fully understand the magnitude of this pandemic. For those of you who don’t and need some convincing, remember that science and math do matter. Here are two of the best articles I’ve seen:

Why Outbreaks Like Coronavirus Spread Exponentially and How to Flatten the Curve – by Harry Stevens in the Washington Post, March 14.

Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now – Politicians, Community Leaders and Business Leaders: What Should You Do and When? – Tomas Pueyo, first written March 10 and updated on March 13. The author closed with this message: “This is probably the one time in the last decade that sharing an article might save lives. They need to understand this to avert a catastrophe. The moment to act is now.” So, I share with all of you.

And if working from home is new to you, here’s a good resource to check out:

Work in the time of Corona – a blog by Alice Goldfuss on March 11th.

My paternal grandfather died in the 1918 flu pandemic. He was young but married with three small children. My father and uncle were sent to an orphanage and my grandmother and aunt went to live with friends. Yes, it’s not 1918. Healthcare has advanced significantly. But we are an even more global and mobile society. The most important lesson from 1918 is the impact of social distancing which is shown in this graph:

In closing, I want to express a huge thank you to all who work in healthcare. The strain on our healthcare system is real. The stress on our healthcare workers is real. Let’s all do our part to #SlowTheSpread and #FlattenTheCurve.