By using this site, you agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Accept
Health Works CollectiveHealth Works CollectiveHealth Works Collective
  • Health
    • Mental Health
    Health
    Healthcare organizations are operating on slimmer profit margins than ever. One report in August showed that they are even lower than the beginning of the…
    Show More
    Top News
    learn to recognize and treat yeast infections
    Most Commonly Asked Questions About Yeast Infections
    November 17, 2021
    Advanced lung cancer diagnosis systems used by doctors
    Advanced Lung Cancer Diagnosis Systems Used by Doctors
    March 6, 2022
    The Top Benefits of a Wearable Blood Pressure Monitor Watch
    The Top Benefits of a Wearable Blood Pressure Monitor Watch
    June 13, 2022
    Latest News
    5 Steps to a Promising Career as a Healthcare Administrator
    July 31, 2025
    Why Custom Telemedicine Apps Outperform Off‑the‑Shelf Solutions
    July 20, 2025
    How Probate Planning Shapes the Future of Your Estate and Family Care
    July 17, 2025
    Beyond Nutrition: Everyday Foods That Support Whole-Body Health
    June 15, 2025
  • Policy and Law
    • Global Healthcare
    • Medical Ethics
    Policy and Law
    Get the latest updates about Insurance policies and Laws in the Healthcare industry for different geographical locations.
    Show More
    Top News
    Soaring Medical Costs Pinned on Medical Devices
    June 7, 2011
    Debt Ceiling Negotiations on Health Care are Mere Cost Shifting
    July 15, 2011
    Is Kathleen Sebelius Listening to the NCPA?
    August 29, 2011
    Latest News
    How IT and Marketing Teams Can Collaborate to Protect Patient Trust
    July 17, 2025
    How Health Choices and Legal Actions Intersect After an Injury
    July 17, 2025
    How communities and healthcare providers can address slip and fall injuries with legal awareness
    July 17, 2025
    Let Your Lawyer Handle the Work Before You Pay Medical Costs
    July 6, 2025
  • Medical Innovations
  • News
  • Wellness
  • Tech
Search
© 2023 HealthWorks Collective. All Rights Reserved.
Reading: Creating Your Mission in Health IT Can Lead to Unanticipated Consequences
Share
Notification Show More
Font ResizerAa
Health Works CollectiveHealth Works Collective
Font ResizerAa
Search
Follow US
  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy
© 2023 HealthWorks Collective. All Rights Reserved.
Health Works Collective > eHealth > Creating Your Mission in Health IT Can Lead to Unanticipated Consequences
eHealth

Creating Your Mission in Health IT Can Lead to Unanticipated Consequences

Chad Johnson
Chad Johnson
Share
8 Min Read
SHARE

The title sounds all sunshine and daffodils, doesn’t it? Create your mission in health IT, how cute. But let’s deal with reality: very few people in health IT have the ability to introduce the sunny concept of a mission into their work lives.

First, what exactly is a health IT mission? That largely depends on your role. Take an interface analyst or the CIO of health system for example. A likely mission would be, “Make my organization the most connected and interoperable healthcare organization in the region.” More sunshine and daffodils, you say? Not necessarily.

The title sounds all sunshine and daffodils, doesn’t it? Create your mission in health IT, how cute. But let’s deal with reality: very few people in health IT have the ability to introduce the sunny concept of a mission into their work lives.

First, what exactly is a health IT mission? That largely depends on your role. Take an interface analyst or the CIO of health system for example. A likely mission would be, “Make my organization the most connected and interoperable healthcare organization in the region.” More sunshine and daffodils, you say? Not necessarily.

More Read

wellness
Sobering Report for Health of 40+
IoT In Healthcare: A Revolution In The Medical Sector
OCR Cloud Computing HIPAA Guidance
Insurer Has E-Security Problem
Patients Take Active Role in Clinical Research

Defining huge, career-defining goals gives you an important cause. It makes your job bigger than the small, perhaps mundane and easily achievable tasks you fill a majority of your time completing. However, according to author Cal Newport, creating a career mission is something that’s possible only after you have the work experience, knowledge and reputation — “career capital” as he calls it — to provide you with the proper insight to choose a mission that aligns with the possibilities afforded by your skillset.

According to Newport in his book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” there are requirements prior to developing a successful career mission:

“You can’t skip straight into a mission without first developing mastery in your field. …The best ideas for mission are found in the adjacent possible and the region just beyond the current cutting edge. To encounter these ideas, therefore, you must first get to the cutting edge, which, in turn, requires expertise. To try to devise a mission when you’re new to a field and lacking any career capital is a venture bound for failure.

“Once you identify a specific mission, however, you’re still tasked with launching specific projects to make it succeed. An effective strategy for accomplishing this task is to try small steps that generate concrete feedback, ‘little bets,’ and then use this feedback, be it good or bad, to help figure out what to try next. This systematic exploration might help you find a way forward that you might not otherwise have noticed.”

Newport’s views on mission, in my opinion, are particularly applicable with health IT because the field also meets the basic economic concept of supply and demand. Health IT skills and experience are rare and overall unique in information technology. There are few qualified candidates for open positions because one can claim to be experienced in health IT only after years of specialized on-the-job training and time spent learning the important details. Once health IT professionals have real-world experience, they are in a unique position of career control that allows them to create a remarkable mission that benefits patients and the overall healthcare community.

Is defining a health IT mission crucial to success? Not necessarily, but it may give more meaning to those seemingly innocuous tasks you check off your scope of work daily, weekly and monthly. It could even be argued that you will arrive at the destination regardless of defining it as a mission in advance, thanks to Meaningful Use requirements. I would counter that defining the mission in advance will speed up the process by forcing you to stay on track and say ‘No’ to tasks that may detract from your defined goal.

In Interoperability From The Ground Up I wrote about Doug Fridsma’s analogy that likened health IT interoperabilty to building a city as opposed to constructing a building. He wrote in Health IT as an Ultra Large-Scale System, “While a blueprint with detailed floor plans of plumbing, electrical and heating/cooling systems makes sense for a single building, it doesn’t work if you try to do the same thing for an entire city.”

That’s where the little bets Newport described in his quote above comes into play when striving to meet health data interoperability goals. The small steps you take on the way toward your mission provide value feedback as you build the interoperable city.

For example, you begin your first small bet by interfacing the health information system (HIS) with the lab information system (LIS). You then step back and evaluate what worked well and what needs to be improved.

You move to your next small step with an enhanced approach that will help you build, test and implement outbound sender/receiver interfaces to an external radiology clinic. After completion, you again regroup and revise plans and strategies for external health data exchange that carry over to your next project of connecting to a regional HIE.

Each step in the process is more difficult than the last, but your skills have increased along the way and you will have more confidence from creating the building blocks you laid as you build the “most connected and interoperable organization in the region.”

Making and learning from these little bets as you build a modern healthcare system will provide you with rare and valuable skills and knowledge that can be leveraged to set and accomplish even more ambitious career missions. But, more importantly, you will have built the framework for a connected health IT ecosystem that can make physicians and other members of the caregiving team work more efficiently. They will have at their disposal more information about patients and about best practices that will allow them to provide better care, which has always been the most important mission of our healthcare system.

 
TAGGED:Health IT
Share This Article
Facebook Copy Link Print
Share

Stay Connected

1.5kFollowersLike
4.5kFollowersFollow
2.8kFollowersPin
136kSubscribersSubscribe

Latest News

5 Steps to a Promising Career as a Healthcare Administrator
5 Steps to a Promising Career as a Healthcare Administrator
Health
July 31, 2025
holistic dental
Holistic Dentist Services Are Natural and Safe
Dental health Specialties
July 28, 2025
botox certification
Help Improve People’s Skin Health Via Botox Certification
Skin Specialties
July 22, 2025
Telemedicine Apps
Why Custom Telemedicine Apps Outperform Off‑the‑Shelf Solutions
Health
July 20, 2025

You Might also Like

Electronic Health Records
BusinesseHealthHospital AdministrationMedical Records

Top Benefits of Electronic Health Records for Psychiatrists and Psychologists

August 15, 2022
Learning Healthcare System
eHealth

The Learning Healthcare System and Order Sets

December 15, 2012

How Facebook’s Graph Search Can Influence Healthcare

February 5, 2013

Just Because We Have Apps for Smartphones Doesn’t Mean We Have Real Mobility in Healthcare

December 22, 2012
Subscribe
Subscribe to our newsletter to get our newest articles instantly!
Follow US
© 2008-2025 HealthWorks Collective. All Rights Reserved.
  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy
Welcome Back!

Sign in to your account

Username or Email Address
Password

Lost your password?