Women in health IT show they're at the top of their game on HealthTech Wire

BERLIN, GERMANY – (HealthTech Wire / Opinion – by Tonya Stewart) –  There may still be relatively few women in healthcare IT – and especially in its upper ranks – but the three women featured in HealthTech Wire’s 'women in healthcare IT special' this month, along with other high-profile women like UK Department of Health CIO Christine Connelly and Dr Joan Dzenowagis, who leads eHealth activities at WHO, are clearly bucking this trend.

Cisco senior director Petra Wilson; Nuance Healthcare vice president and general manager Janet Dillione (recently polled one of the 'top 25 women in healthcare') and Jen Henderson of the UK's Northumbria NHS Foundation Trust, who led one of the largest and most successful speech recognition implementation projects in UK healthcare, are three different women with three very different messages. They all however share one thing in common – a passion for the potential of healthcare IT.

The discussion about women in healthcare IT was started by Petra Wilson, also a HIMSS Europe Governing Council Member, in her inspirational Perspective article “IT's different for girls”. She explains how, despite the very real phenomena of 'glass ceilings' and 'sticky floors', it's IT's image problem that has been most at fault for the lack of women in the profession. Interestingly, she says that it is the skills of transformation and engagement – which many women have – that are what the profession currently needs! She also addresses the exciting way in which new technology and social networking tools in particular are changing the way we perceive IT – and attracting more women into the profession as a result.

In her interview with HealthTech Wire, Janet Dillione provides a much-needed wake-up call to the profession. She speaks of the industry's duty to provide quality healthcare IT solutions, 'one hundred percent of the time', because, 'after all, at the end of the chain is a patient, and that patient could be you, me or a member of our family':  'Our solutions must be easy enough to implement, use and support. They must not complicate things for the provider. We have to be consistently dependable, one hundred percent of the time. We have to remember that our software might be running on the mobile device of a physician responding to an emergency call. That needs to be our benchmark.'

And Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust's Jen Henderson, meanwhile, who introduced speech recognition across 10 hospitals and saw document turnaround times reduced from 13 weeks to 48 hours as a result, gives advice to large-scale institutions looking to follow her lead: 'Go for it – but get your infrastructure right first!' Her experience, and that of healthcare institutions throughout Europe, is proving the capacity of speech recognition systems to revolutionize healthcare, cut costs and facilitate the adoption of electronic patient records. She advises getting support networks in place before you start, factoring in teething time – 'the volume of work you get through can slow down for a while' and finding 'champions' in each department – 'the ones that are really excited about the possibilities of the new system', who can train and enthuse colleagues.

So if you want to keep on the pulse with what these and other inspirational women are doing in healthcare IT today, log into HealthTech Wire regularly.

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Tonya Stewart is a writer and  journalist and former assistant editor of the British Journal of Healthcare Computing. She can be contacted at comms@littlewhitefeather.co.uk 

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