For healthcare IT leaders, ensuring teams are engaged and feel connected to mission is becoming increasingly critical. “It’s always been important for me to make sure I can translate for my teams how the work they do supports our patients and clinicians, and contributes to the strategic success of the organization,” said Maureen Hetu, AVP of IS Operations at Penn Medicine.

The most effective way to do that, she said during a recent interview, is to go right to the source by inviting clinicians to tell their stories and help IS teams realize “the tremendous positive impact they have.” During the interview, Hetu talked about how her team is leveraging storytelling to improve satisfaction, why relationship-building and collaboration are more important than ever, and how her guiding philosophy has evolved through the years. She also discussed the benefits of being with an academic medical center, what attracted her to Penn Medicine, and the qualities she finds most valuable in future leaders.

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Key Takeaways

* One of Hetu’s key priorities is migrating finance, supply chain, and HR functions to Infor CloudSuite across the organization, which she hopes will provide an opportunity to “take advantage of much more complex tools so we can improve processes.”

* Penn Medicine’s IS team was able to “adapt quickly” during the early days of the pandemic and ensure remote workers had the telecommunications support they needed. “They’re a pretty agile group.”

* Having tools like Microsoft Teams has proven invaluable in facilitating collaboration — not just between managers and teams, but among team members.

* “It’s not just a matter of making sure projects occur on time and on budget, but making sure we’re providing the right talent for those initiatives that are most important to the organization.”

* As an IT leader, “you rely on your relationship building skills to understand the organization, and you use your experience and expertise to make sure you’re addressing challenges.”

Q&A with Maureen Hetu, AVP, IS Operations, Penn Medicine, Part 1

Gamble:  Hi Maureen, thanks so much for taking some time to speak with healthsystemCIO. Let’s start with a high-level overview of Penn Medicine.

Hetu:  Penn Medicine includes six acute care hospitals and hundreds of outpatient locations throughout the region. Several of our hospitals are located in the city of Philadelphia, but we also have a hospital in Chester County and one in Princeton, N.J., so we’re spread out a bit geographically.

In terms of my role, I have responsibility for IS operations. That covers a range of functions, including the service desk, IS project management office, corporate applications, IS finance and contracting, and oversight of our ERP deployment that’s currently underway.

 

Gamble:  In terms of the structure, who do you report to?

Hetu:  I report to Mike Restuccia, who is the senior VP and CIO at Penn Medicine.

 

Gamble:  You mentioned ERP. What are you doing in that area?

Hetu:  Penn Medicine decided several years ago to move from Lawson S3 to Infor CloudSuite. And so, an implementation effort is currently underway to migrate all of the finance, supply chain, and human resource functions to the cloud across all of our hospitals. It’s also an opportunity to integrate Lancaster General Hospital, which is one of Penn Medicine’s facilities, onto a common application. And so, it helps complete the business transformation, as well as doing an upgrade of the software.