Manager, IT Applications, Trinity Health
Silver Spring, MD
Tim is an Enterprise Clinical Application Manager for Trinity Health, a Catholic health system based in Livonia, Michigan with over 90 hospitals across 22 states. The closest hospital in this system to Catholic University is Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, MD, just off the Forest Glen Metro stop. Tim says, “My role is to manage all clinical applications for the duration of their lifecycle across our regional health ministries, or hospitals. I lead a team of support analysts from implementation of new applications to software and hardware maintenance and transitioning and sunsetting applications at their end of life. My team performs routine maintenance on servers hosted at both our enterprise data center and on-premises at our hospital systems.
“The clinical applications we support are patient monitoring applications, pharmacy applications, nursing, physician, and emergency/EMS applications, and oncology applications. My team is fully remote, and we have privileged access credentials to remote-controlled end user workstations and access virtual servers to support our hospital staff 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A typical day for me is monitoring our daily service ticket queue and assigning analysts to complete the work. I meet routinely with vendors to discuss upcoming application upgrades or new products that must be implemented to maintain our support posture. The largest challenge is driving standardization across our enterprise by implementing software and hardware that is consistent at each hospital. We want minimal deviation between the applications we support and the hardware they run on between each site. This leads to better stewardship of our resources, but ultimately better patient outcomes; as support time for clinical staff is cut down drastically if we are all working off common platforms and applications. I have travelled to most of Trinity Health’s hospitals to help during implementations and it is always a welcome sight to see an application in my support portfolio making a difference for a patient.”
Tim’s path into a tech-based career is a story that weaves his choice of history as a major with a busy set of commitments during his college years. He has lived in Maryland his entire life. He went to DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville, MD and played football for the Catholic University Cardinals. In the summer before his freshman year, his mother told him about a temporary computer training job at the hospital she had worked at since 1989 as an ICU Nurse. The hospital was transitioning from paper medical records to a new electronic health record (EHR) system. With this transition, they needed young professionals to learn about this new EHR application and then train the medical and dental staff on how to use it.
“That entire summer I trained hundreds of physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, residents, and medical students on the new electronic system. It was so rewarding to have knowledge to share with the medical community and I learned so much about that community. I started at Catholic in August, as a business major, playing football, and working 20 hours a week at Holy Cross Hospital in my spare time. The EHR went live in September, and my schedule was a mess. I would work overnight shifts, then get off the Red Line in scrubs and go directly to Dr. James Riley’s colonial Latin America class in Leahy Hall. I took this class as an elective, as it worked around my work and football schedule.
“That class is what eventually turned me into a history major. After my first year, I was burned out. Our football team wasn’t doing well, and I was not doing well as a business major. The two things I did well were training providers on tech, and Dr. Riley’s Latin America and Modern Mexico curriculum. That was my “Aha” moment. I met with Dr. Michael Kimmage before my sophomore year and changed to a history major. With my new major and new schedule, I was back in control. My work at Holy Cross Hospital turned into a part-time position, where I could work five hours Tuesday and Thursdays, and work ten hours every other weekend. I worked that shift until graduation and it was the best thing I could have done for my career.
“The application has many modules to it. The basic module was writing notes, but the more complex modules were writing patient orders. I mastered all the workflows. In time, I would learn modules for electronic fetal monitoring, surgical documentation, anesthesia, intensive care monitoring, etc. Over four years, I was inundated by new technologies and new workflows for every single service line at our local hospital. I was part of the community and was on first name basis with executive level and medical chiefs. The field of study is now Health Informatics; however, at that time, it was at its earliest onset. A fusion of technology and learning, it was hard to differentiate myself from other IT professionals. In all my time in Health Informatics, I did not do IT work. Hardware and software maintenance was done by another group; however in every interaction good or bad with IT, I learned. In time, I learned what it took to host, maintain, and support an application and applied to the corporate IT department as a Clinical Application Analyst based out of Holy Cross Hospital. After ten years I now manage the team that I once helped create with many other local applications teams.”
Tim outlines a few cornerstone skills that translate from a history major to the IT profession. “Independent research and writing are cornerstones to having success within the school. In healthcare IT, we need to communicate issues, fixes, timelines, and plans to all stakeholders from the project manager to the vendor, to the clinical stakeholders to the business owners. The more you know and can communicate is key. Oral skills and honing the ability to take a position on an issue and defend it are another cornerstone skill.
“I believe that the History Department instilled the power of collaboration in its students. There was always open dialog and each voice was heard. We have finite dates and primary accounts of events in history, but collaborating with our colleagues allows endless opportunity to make arguments surrounding why an event occurred. This ability to think critically about why something happened and then provide analysis and direction is an immeasurable skill in the IT world. Every time an application or network goes down, we need to investigate. Being able to think critically allows you to back track and see where everything went wrong. You see the result, but what was the root cause? Was it one failure or was its multiple failures over time? Is it a systemic problem or an acute episode? Will it happen again? These are all questions that both history majors and IT professionals will ask, every single day.”
What perspective does Tim offer to current history majors? He would tell each current history major to do what you do best: do your research, but don’t be so rigid that you don’t follow your passion. “You don’t just one day go into tech work. I developed a passion for it over my lifetime, from using my family’s first PC to my first cell phone, to the first time I decided to take a networking switch apart and see if I could put it back together. I just like to play on the computer. Some people like to do this, not all, and that is okay. Doing the research is the easy part. Anyone can look up ‘jobs for history majors’ and see the industries that are available to them.
“But you cannot be rigid and think these are the only careers a history major can have. Find what you like doing and work towards that. The skills you are developing will translate directly into what you want to do. I had no idea being one of 50 temporary computer trainers would lead to my career in IT today. I found a passion for helping others learn technology because I always had a passion for technology. Along the way I found ways to optimize my training, collaborate with other colleagues across different departments, and figure out where I fit best. The path is never straight forward. Lean into what you like to do and use those cornerstone history skills to make your path. I wish I knew back in class how much researching the cause and effect of an event and communicating facts and solutions would have in my tech career.”