Sonya Christian, CIO, West Georgia Health System
There is perhaps no better way to learn the importance of disaster planning and recovery than having to spend 11 straight days in a hospital in the wake of a hurricane. For Sonya Christian, who was then CIO at Slidell Memorial Hospital, living through the experience of Katrina taught her how to be a leader. Now CIO at West Georgia Health, Christian is applying the lessons she learned during that stressful time and ensuring that disaster planning is a top priority. In this interview, she talks about her experience with Katrina, what it was like to take on a CIO position during a major Meditech implementation, her concerns about the proposed Stage 2 rules, and the one piece of advice she has for MU attestation. She also discusses the benefits of earning a CHCIO certification and why all CIOs need to give back to the profession.
Chapter 3
- The value of mentoring
- The power of education combined with diverse experience
- Giving back to the industry
- Katrina’s disaster recovery lessons
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Bold Statements
I think education without experience is not particularly valid and I think experience without education is a hard position to be in, but when you combine them, you have the best of both worlds.
I don’t think that they can be skill heavy in one particular area unless they’ve done their homework in the other area as well.
Yes, the technology is important, and we worked steadily to recover from that disaster but, in the midst of the disaster itself, it was that caring, that leadership, that they look to you for.
Gamble: For CIOs who are women and who are maybe on the earlier side of their career, you would say it’s really important to get out there and really get involved in CHIME, HIMSS, things like that, and really put yourself out there?
Christian: I would think so, and the other thing to mention is I have a mentor who helped me years ago when I was trying to get started in healthcare IT, and there were several things that he told me: (1) he encouraged me to complete my MBA. I think that it’s critical that you have that educational discipline behind you; there’s so much that you learn about leadership, about project management, and those MBA programs are just invaluable to you as you move into an IT leadership position. Secondly, he encouraged me to experience all parts of the IT department. I worked as a project manager for him, I worked as an operations manager for the help desk and other technical service departments; I worked with the clinicians and physicians on several projects; and so I got to work in many areas of the healthcare IT department so that experience was available to me. Eperiencing all that, combined with the formal education, and then having that vision of what you want to do, I think all of those things served me in good stead.
I think education without experience is not particularly valid and I think experience without education is a hard position to be in, but when you combine them, you have the best of both worlds.
Gamble: I think that’s a great point, and that seems like it was very beneficial to have this person who gave you those pieces of advice. As you advance in your career, do you plan to get involved in mentoring programs to help guide younger people along in this field?
Christian: I actually work with the CIO Executive Council Pathways Program and just finished a 5-month mentorship with nine women who are seeking CIO positions, and I’ll be starting a second group at the end of May; so I think it’s very important that you give back to the profession that’s been good to you. I think that one of the biggest rewards of being in the position that you are is the ability to share that experience with other people, and help them move in the direction that they set for themselves.
Gamble: Absolutely. Do you see yourself giving similar advice as that you were given, in terms of getting both education and diverse experience?
Christian: I think that would be something I will encourage to anyone and certainly with my own staff here. If they have an interest in IT leadership, I share with them that they’ve got to break out of the mold, maybe they’re great at technology — and that’s wonderful because we need strong technology leaders in our departments — but you’ve got to see the whole picture. You need to spend a little bit of time in the application support area; you need to understand how the help desk and the desktop service arena works, you need project management office experience — all of that just really makes for a well-rounded person and, I think, the CIO has to be a well rounded person. I don’t think that they can be skill heavy in one particular area unless they’ve done their homework in the other area as well.
Gamble: Right. I’ve also heard it said that balance is important when building out your staff – that you need tech folks, clinical folks, etc.
Christian: I think that’s an excellent point, and I agree with you. I crack up when people say they wish they had all people like themselves. If I had all people just like me, I’d be up a creek because I need those people with the attention to detail; not that I can’t have attention to detail but I’m typically looking at the larger picture, and I need someone to be down in the weeds doing the back-up work that gets all these threads pulled together; so I think that’s an excellent point.
Gamble: And if you had a whole group of people who were detail-oriented, that’s no good for planning, I’m sure.
Christian: Well, it’s not and sometimes people can get so caught up in the details that they kind of get analysis paralysis going and you have to have someone who sees the total picture; you have to have someone who’s able to gather the details to make all of these work; and then you also have to have some who have organizational skills to keep the whole project moving — all of these skills are important.
Gamble: The last thing I just want to touch on a little bit was your past experience. Now, you did hold a CIO job previously that was at Slidell Memorial Hospital, right?
Christian: Correct. I was there for four years prior to my tenure here at West Georgia.
Gamble: And one of the things I had read prior to this interview was that you were there when the area was hit by hurricane Katrina. I can imagine how much that that really affected the hospital and the area, but what was it like being there through that experience and what did that teach you as far as the important of disaster preparedness goes?
Christian: One of the things that Slidell Memorial was good about was practicing their disaster discovery. Living in the hurricane belt, they had come to several near-misses quite a few times, and I’ll tell you the year that Katrina occurred, we had already done two to three disaster drills during that hurricane season; so when the time came and we knew that Katrina was in the gulf and it looked like her path was headed our way, we just worked with that same plan that we’d been practicing earlier and yes, I feel like we were lucky the storm passed over the hospital. We had probably about $2 million in damages, but when you consider the entire value of our property, we probably just met the deductible level $2 million worth of damage.
It was very interesting; we had 125 patients the day before Katrina on that Sunday morning before Katrina hit. On Monday, we reduced our patients number to 14. By the end of the day on Sunday and we really just ran out of time – counter flow had started; and so traffic was all flowing in an exit bound. We had about 190 staff persons still with us at the time; so we all hunkered down for the storm itself; and I was there from the day before Katrina hit until 11 days after Katrina, working in the command center, working with my IT staff and just doing, in general, whatever needed to be done.
Gamble: I would imagine that experience and its lessons will stay with you forever.
Christian: I think the biggest lesson I learned is that in an emergency situation, the people are the heart of the situation, taking care of your spouse, taking care of your patients, meeting their physical and emotional needs. We did not have a minister or a counselor on board with us during that time and working in the command center, I found myself time and time again working one on one with our employees to either encourage them or to pat them on the back, or just to listen if they needed to talk.
Yes, the technology is important, and we worked steadily to recover from that disaster but, in the midst of the disaster itself, it was that caring, that leadership, that they look to you for.
Gamble: You’re in a different location now; but is disaster recovery preparedness still a top priority?
Christian: Well, right now we’re going through a comprehensive disaster recovery planning phase. We’d always had a policy in place here at West Georgia – tornadoes, fire – those are the types of things that we’re concerned with most, but we decided to take it back to the grassroots. We’ve just finished interviews with what I would call 35 application honor groups — we run about 150 application here at West Georgia — and we divided those into groups of common application owners and then we conducted an interview with each one of those groups to address the criticality of each application in the organization. We’ve created a matrix and I find that there are a lot of fives (five being our highest category of importance) on our list; so we’re taking that list back to our IT steering committee and asking them for their assistance in further refining that prioritization matrix. As soon as that’s in place, we’ll go back to address each of those applications and the way that we will recover those in the event of a disaster.
We’re currently running a duplicate storage network away from the hospital, but we can do better than that, and this investigation is the starting point.
Chapter 4 Coming Soon …
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