It’s quite a paradox.

During the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, the streets of New York City were deserted — even in the middle of the day. Specialized since 1863, Hospital for Special Surgery proactively paused 95 percent of procedures and transformed to provide multi-specialty support to the city’s overburdened healthcare system.

“There was so much break-fix work to do,” said Jamie Nelson, now in her 11th year as CIO at HSS. In the few days of transition before and after HSS pivoted to support the surge, “our teams were so busy with day-to-day projects that it didn’t feel like anything slowed down.”

As a result, once her team was given the green light to move forward with projects such as selecting a new ERP solution, they were ready, said Nelson. During a recent interview, she talked about how HSS survived the lockdown – and why she made it a point to show up every day, and her team’s big plans to continue to digitize as much as possible. She also discussed the “new paradigm” leaders face in the wake of Covid, and what worries her most as a female leader.

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Key Takeaways

* “There’s so much focus on digital in terms of the consumer, with apps and things like that, but it’s much broader than that. It’s digitizing the back office, digitizing human resources, and digitizing pathology.”

* Another benefit of digitization? Being able to use cutting-edge technologies “helps motivate staff and keep them moving in the right direction.”

* Implementing a plan for bringing staff back to the office doesn’t happen overnight — and perhaps it shouldn’t. “It’s okay to take a few months to put this together, because hopefully you’re getting real-time feedback from the staff on what’s good, what’s not good, and what they want to change.”

* As some workers — particularly women — choose to remain remote, Nelson is concerned it may “cause us to slip backwards in terms of equality in the workplace. And that scares me.”

Q&A with Jamie Nelson, SVP & CIO, HSS, Part 2 [Click here to view Part 1]

Gamble:  I read an interview you did where you talked about the work HSS is doing with digital pathology. That seems really exciting.

Nelson:  We actually brought that live during Covid.

 

Gamble:  That’s really impressive.

Nelson:  We were very lucky. We’ve been looking at that probably for five years. It had to get FDA clearance, and so we needed to clear three pieces: Sectra, the Leica scanner, and Epic Beaker. They were all cleared, and we brought that live more than a year and ago. In the middle of Covid, we did that.

It’s interesting; there’s so much focus on digital in terms of the consumer, with apps and things like that, but it’s much broader than that. It’s digitizing the back office, digitizing human resources, and digitizing pathology. Now, pathologists can bring up images of the bone using PACS and view the pathology underneath it, and put the two together. Surgeons are doing the same thing, and now they’re interested in pathology again because it’s easy and interesting and they can mov...