Jayden Nyman

Module 4

            I decided to interview a close neighbor for this assignment. She serves as the Director of Operations for Telehealth Services throughout the Intermountain system and participates in the development of system plans and execution of those plans across all the system hospitals. Telehealth Involves non-physician practitioners and includes the use of monitoring equipment with or without streaming data to a monitoring center and is supported by qualified nurses to act on the information. She is responsible for leading, managing and facilitating multiple Telehealth efforts. She collaborates with the Medical Director for Telehealth Services as well as other operational directors for the Medical Group and Clinical Programs and is responsible for ensuring that monitoring processes are designed, implemented, and executed to gather the appropriate data for measuring progress in line with ATP philosophy of TQM and GE style Six Sigma Lean Processes.

The reason her job falls under the Information Technology category is because she coordinates outsourced and offshore software development collaborations and consulting services, which is awesome because we have gone over this in The World is Flat book we are reading. The majority of what she does is creating software that is more organized and efficient for the doctors’ use. When I was interviewing her she explained to me what her team had just accomplished. To whoever reads this if you are familiar with Skype then think of it in that sense. A baby was born 4 weeks early, shortly after her birth their family medicine physician recognized that the baby could be suffering from a collapsed lung. The baby needed to be transported to another medical center after her condition got worse, but there just wasn’t time and something had to be done as soon as possible. This is when my amazing neighbor’s team comes into play. Her Intermountain team had installed the Teleservices equipment just days before the baby’s incident. By using the equipment their family doctor was able to communicate by video with an experienced neonatologist. The neonatologist was able to watch and consult in real time during the procedure to ensure success. Soon after the operation, the baby was able to return home healthy. This is truly incredible to me, what her team was able to create is going to be a life changer. In 2014-2015 the Teleservices they created are going to expand enterprise wide.

What I learned from the interview with my neighbor is that a lot of jobs in Information Technology have a real purpose. She was able to save the life of that newborn baby. A career that can be as rewarding as that without the stress of performing the actual surgery seems stunning. After looking at what she accomplished, as well as what she is working to accomplish everyday, has made me seriously consider a job in her field. I would love to be able to save people’s lives, as well as design software for doctors and patients to be able to use to their advantage. My neighbor offered to take me into work with her sometime to really see what she does, which made me even more interested. Besides saving lives she makes a lot of money and loves what she does. She did not have a negative thing to say about her job. She loves that she doesn’t have to travel, has every weekend off as well as holidays. She also mentioned that she has more vacation time then she knows what to do with. I love going on trips so this would be to my advantage. This assignment has really been of great benefit to me, and I believe will help me better decide what I want to get my degree in.