Janice Benggio, MBA, PMP, CPMSM, CPCS, CPHRM, serves as Senior PMO Analyst, IT of Broward Health.
On April 4th, Janice will speak at Becker's Hospital Review 10th Annual Meeting. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place April 1-4, 2019 in Chicago.
To learn more about the conference and Janice's session, click here.
Question: What one strategic initiative will demand the most of your time and energy in 2019?
Janice Benggio: One of the projects I’m involved with is to automate processes used in the medical staff office to improve some of their workflows and reduce manual, time-consuming tasks. Not only will this streamline the department’s productivity, but it will also improve satisfaction of hospital leadership and physicians.. Many processes that are typically manual can be transitioned to software applications, allowing the medical staff department to be more engaged on value-based initiatives.
Q: Healthcare takes a lot of heat for not innovating quickly. What's your take on this?
JB: I’ve worked in healthcare IT as a project manager long enough to understand the double-edged sword of technology innovations. When changes are made quickly without sufficient buy-in and education to end-users, it can seem that the changes are complex and happen too quickly for users to have comfort in adopting the changes. However, if the technology does not keep pace in the market of competitive advances, valuable ROI can be lost for failing to adopt innovation quickly. This observation leads me to believe that leaders in healthcare must face innovation with the stamina to accept innovation with boldness, while ensuring there is a support network to accept the risks of change.
Q: Can you share some praise with us about people you work with? What does greatness look like to you when it comes to your team?
JB: It’s easy to praise the direct healthcare givers in the hospital, because they are the ones interacting with patients and families the most. However, the non-clinical staff play a valuable role in making sure the many support services function as they should, and they often operate in the shadows. I’ve been impressed with the wide range of skills and intense dedication of our organization’s Information Technology Department. Upgrades to systems and hardware often impact users in the hospital, so it’s common for IT staff to spend many hours at night working on upgrades and maintenance to have the least impact on the clinical caregivers that depend on 100% uptime to safely care for patients. There is a great deal of planning and testing that happens before upgrades and maintenance happen, because it’s often critical to be sure the changes will not cause harm or negative consequences. Just today, one of our IT teams spent several hours late at night, testing how a change would impact physician workstations so that we have no surprises when the changes are made. These same people will get a few hours rest before they are back on the job, doing what they do best to provide ongoing support and reliability that technology throughout the organization works smoothly.