Women In Health IT

Since HIMSS’s July 27 2016 release of the longitudinal gender compensation study in which we reported on a widening pay gap between men and women health IT workers, I’ve published a blog on what these facts tell us, and an overview of why pay gaps exist. If knowledge truly precedes improvement, then it’s time to apply this knowledge on what we can do now to improve the situation.  To that end, here are some actions we invite you to engage in. Women in Health IT Initiative  - HIMSS launched its Women in Health IT initiative in February, 2016.  Our initiative welcomes all genders in addressing the gender gap in health IT and the need to more effectively equip, empower, and recognize women sector-wide.   Healthcare IT News – Part of the HIMSS family, Healthcare IT News recently launched a site and bi-weekly eNewsletter focused on this issue so that readers can get the latest news and developments across the sector. Most Influential Women in Health IT Award - Now through Oct.  3, we’re accepting nominations for the Most Influential Women in Health IT.  You’ll note the word “influential.”  The criteria for this Award embraces women who are making positive change happen at all stages of their careers in health IT – from students to women running major health IT-related organizations.  Our judges represent leaders from across the health sector with a passion for the best use of IT to improve health and healthcare  Women in Health IT Roundtable - At 2 p.m. ET on Aug. 25, our Women in Health IT Roundtable launches; we welcome all to register and join us.  Taking an inclusionary approach, for the first year our Roundtable will be open to HIMSS members and non-members alike.  We plan to host Roundtable webinars at least bi-monthly.  We’ll keep you posted on topics, dates and times, so you can join in. STEPS to Value’s Women in Health IT Podcast Series: Starting in late August, the HIMSS’s hit podcast, STEPS to Value, will launch a monthly podcast series focused on Women in Health IT. These 15-minute interviews with women who lead healthcare and health IT at their respective organizations will bring to the programs interesting and valuable insights on their careers and focus on health IT.  Watch for this series, and in the meantime, listen to STEPS to Value’s season 2 opening episode "The Value of “People” vs. “Patients”: Understanding Long-Term, Post-Acute Care (LTPAC)”.   #healthITchicks – I want to highlight the excellent work that Jennifer Dennard is doing with #healthITchicks.  The #healthITchicks community has grown exponentially with the increasing attention to gender equality issues in the workplace. From politicians to mainstream media, gender-related workplace issues like equal pay and parental leave appear in an increasingly bright spotlight.  Jennifer’s been excited to see participation in #healthITchicks’ LinkedIn group, tweet chats, and more recently, Blabs, increase month over month. Jennifer began organizing meetups at the HIMSS Annual Conference in 2013.  Every year, they’ve grown in attendance starting with 30 women and men. At the HIMSS16 meetup, at least 100 attendees brought a palpable energy and engaged in a very lively conversation. As Jennifer explained, “I thought it so gratifying the several folks (most of them men) that came up to me afterwards to tell me how surprised they were by the buzz in the room, and how much they appreciated the event. It's important that we continue to create opportunities for our industry to discuss these issues.” Let me close by saying how fortunate I am to work in what I believe to be one of the greatest sectors of the U.S. economy. Health IT experienced an explosive growth during one of the toughest economic periods in recent U.S. history and the attractiveness of our sector grew as IT workers from other industries sought employment in health and healthcare organizations. The point is, now more than ever we in health IT need to live out the promise our field holds for all IT workers regardless of their gender, age, race, etc. It’s too important to do otherwise. An economy and society that actively equips, empowers, compensates, and advances all peoples has a much higher potential to achieve prosperity.  Join Us. Knowledge precedes improvement.  It’s time to make positive change happen.  Please join us.  This blog was first posted on the HIMSS site.

On August 10, I was so excited to share that we had reached another milestone in the Walking Gallery. Five years into our patient rights movement we had reached 400 members!  I even shared the post that lists where everyone lives. I loved the picture blogger chose for the post. It was me and Jess assembling the Walking Gallery in its lego form. A lot of people read that post and reminded me they had moved to a new state or country. I dutifully changed the post for each request. Today I added a new country to the post. I called it Heaven. I placed Jess Jacobs there and cried. Isaac saw me crying and asked me why. I told him Jess Jacobs died. Our friend from D.C. we played legos with and visited in the hospital.   Jess had been fighting for her life for years. You would have never known that from looking at her. She was a statuesque beauty who understood health policy. She was gracious and kind and great at Twitter.      Jess Joined the Walking Gallery in 2012 and her jacket is number 211. "Is she okay?" Her patient story told about her POTS condition.       When I painted her jacket, I depicted one of the times she fell faint to the pavement. She woke to find strangers looking down upon her. She would laugh off such medical adventures and do her job and help her friends. She helped build the lego Walking Gallery and helped prepare for the 2012 gathering in D.C.         In the summer of 2013, I moved to Grantsville and did not get to see Jess as much in person. She began to have more problems with her care and we created a secret group on facebook to help Jess. I recruited lovely friends who live in DC and who had never met Jess before but would come over to check on her and make sure she was okay. Jess reached out to many other close friends and added them to the group so she could have advocates and people to help.         For the past two years I have had to watch from afar as this wonderful woman grew sicker. I watched her fight to keep working, fight to be admitted to hospitals, and fight to be believed.     I watched as so many people fell away from her life as it became clear that she was not getting better.   I asked her to join us at Cinderblocks 2 in May. She said she would love to go but she thought she was probably too sick.    This is the way I would like to remember Jess. I see her at my dining room table building lego mini figures with Isaac.    But I will always see another Jess, as I advocate for better healthcare around the world. I will see her as a patient that the system failed to care for. I will see her struggle and I will fight for change.   I will never forget she was the first to fall. We will miss her always.    This post originally appeared on Regina Holliday's Medical Advocacy blog.

Fine print of many marketplace health plan documents allows them to refuse a range of services, disproportionately affecting women, study says.

People often ask me how I find time to write a weekly blog with a big, busy CIO job. I tell them all the same thing – it’s a discipline. I try to start early in the week with an idea, draft it one night, come back to it the next night to finalize and then post it on Thursday or Friday morning. Topics are often timely; something strikes me and I tell myself “that will blog”. I add the idea to my running list. This week it included tips on doing presentations for executive groups, personal organization challenges and tips, and what’s possible to accomplish as an interim leader in just 6 months. But this week I had as many as five new ideas but no time to start writing any of them. By Thursday night if I haven’t settled on a topic and started, I’m in trouble. Taking time to write may compete with critical work I need to finish up by the end of the week. This week was one of those weeks. This week started out with a bang.  By 9AM Monday, I was juggling 4 different issues. A system issue after a scheduled weekend service pack upgrade caused problems in our revenue cycle systems. There was an escalated physician report of an access problem over the weekend. Working with my team we could move all but one to closure by the end of the day. It was a week full of meetings and follow-ups squeezed in between. And managing the endless stream of emails. But it was an atypical week with late afternoon/evening meetings and dinners with colleagues every night. This kind of evening schedule impacts one of my other disciplines – nightly exercise. I just have to find the time when I can. We dealt with dissatisfied and frustrated physicians over EMR issues – some that we thought were behind us. We finished prep for our monthly executive IT Steering Committee which included some critical infrastructure presentations on a significant data center investment and disaster recovery planning. This is what a week looks like for CIOs and their leadership team. So the most recent blog topics I have added to my running list will have to wait for future weeks. My blog writing discipline continues. I probably need to go back to my original approach when I started blogging over 2 years ago – decide the topic on the weekend and start the draft on Sunday night before the week kicks into high gear. But this week was one of “those weeks.” Blog originally posted on www.sueschade.com.  

Large employers are taking more control over health care costs and quality by pressuring changes to how care is actually delivered, based on the results from the 2017 Health Plan Design Survey sponsored by the National Business Group on Health (NBGH). Health care cost increases will average 5% in 2017 based on planned design changes, according to the top-line of the study. The major cost drivers, illustrated in the wordle, will be specialty pharmacy (discussed in yesterday’s Health Populi), high cost patient claims, specific conditions (such as musculoskeletal/back pain), medical inflation, and inpatient care. To temper these medical trend increases, large employers are looking to change the way health care is accessed and delivered through funding telehealth (for 90% of companies), providing price transparency tools (among 85% of companies), building and referring workers to Centers of Excellence (in 85% of firms, focused most on transplants, bariatric surgery, joint surgery, heart care, and cancers), and to a lesser extent, promoting accountable care organizations (among about one-fourth of employers). Consumer-directed health plans (CDHPs) will be a universal health insurance plan design by 2020, shown in the second chart. At least 84% of large employers will offer a CDHP option in 2017, and one-third will offer only a CDHP. Most high-deductible health plans in 2017 (92%) will be accompanied by a health savings account (HSA) The median employee cost-sharing amount this year was a $1,600 deductible for employee (single) coverage in a CDHP, and in-network out-of-pocket maximum payments were $4,000. For families, the out-of-pocket max was $7,200 with a $3,200 deductible. Telehealth is expected to be a universally-sponsored service among large employers by 2019, and most companies already use virtual care. One-third of large employers directly contract with telehealth vendors, according to NBGH’s survey. While most employers are offering telehealth services, in the first half of 2016, only 3% of employees had utilized this benefit. Looking to the future, employers are bolstering investments in mental and behavioral health, and in the financial wellbeing of their workforce. Influence physical well-being is a top-three priority among 85% of employers, followed by improvement employee engagement in healthcare decision making (that is, consumerism) for 65% of companies, emotional/mental wellbeing among 59%, and financial security and wellbeing for 58% of employers. Health Populi’s Hot Points:  Large employers are emboldened to drive changes in health care delivery — especially for virtual care via telehealth channels and narrowing networks for high-cost specialty care like transplantation and bariatric surgery via Centers of Excellence. Most employers are also deploying at least one cost transparency tool to support employees’ healthcare consumerism and decision-making chops. However, only 3% of employees have used telehealth services that have been available in the first half of 2016; this is an important proxy for understanding just how “consumerist” employees are with respect to saving money in deductible spending. The consumer-patient’s cost difference  between a virtual vs. in-person visit is significant: a telehealth visit with American Well is currently priced at a low of $49 compared with a face-to-face primary care visit for $95, urgent care for $140, or emergency department admission for $750. NBGH identifies employer tools and programs more companies are offering in 2017, including nurse coaching for care condition management, disease management, lifestyle management, self-service decision support tools, price transparency tools (fast-growing in 2017), and medical decision support/second opinion services. Large employers clearly understand the importance of these tools to support their mass adoption of high-deductible health plans. There’s no consumer-direction without such programs, and less optimal ROI on employers’ significant investments in health insurance without them. This week’s announcement of Accolade receiving a $70 million investment to further scale the company’s healthcare concierge services is an example of the market’s recognition of the importance of these employer-sponsored programs. This is health reform, playing out in the private sector. This blog first appeared at Health Populi.

Vindell Washington to replace DeSalvo at the helm of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. 

The remainder of the 100 wealthiest technology leaders worldwide are men.

“You need to go beyond puppies and rainbows.” That’s the advice this week from a search firm expert. I’m part of the search committee for the new president of a non-profit organization where I am a board member. The search expert was telling us to go deeper in our questioning. Get past the fluff and canned responses. He said it’s ok to make candidates uncomfortable. I’ve done a lot of hiring in my management career for direct reports. And I’ve been on search committees for executive positions. I’ve also been on the other side of the search process being interviewed for CIO positions. You review resumes, you listen to the search firm’s summary comments on each candidate, and then you finally meet the candidates in the first round of interviews. It’s a process. And you only have an hour or so to get to know each person. What you see on paper are the qualifications. In the interview you get to know the person. I said in one of my first blog posts, hiring the right people is one of the most important decisions managers make. For executive positions, the process is more rigorous with more people involved. After all there is much more at stake when you are choosing one of the top executives. You are all working off the same position description and the organization’s mission and strategy. Yet search committee members come to the process with different perspectives. As a result, they may be looking for different attributes in the candidates. They need to be open to executives taking the organization in new directions and not just finding someone like the outgoing leader. John Glaser, the Partners HealthCare CIO told me when I was interviewing for the Brigham and Women’s Hospital CIO position,”It’s not just what you say but how you say it.” John made it clear that personality was critical. No pressure. Another way of saying it — “Is there the right chemistry?” If the candidate gets to the interview stage, it’s assumed they have the knowledge, experience and skills to do the job. So then it’s about fit. Is this someone people can work with? I met over 20 people during the Brigham and Women’s search process, so there were plenty of people to weigh in on whether I was the right candidate. And as the candidate I was also able to assess if they were an organization and group of people that I wanted to work with. I did. I was there for almost 13 years and loved the leadership team I worked with. When I advise my colleagues in the search process, I remind them that it’s a two-way street. The organization is evaluating them and they are evaluating the organization and the people they’d be working with. I encourage them to be sure they know what they are looking for. If it’s not the right organization or opportunity, say so and withdraw; don’t waste anyone’s time. If there are concerns but you want to know more, keep going until all your questions and concerns are answered. A job change is a big decision, especially at executive levels and when it means relocating your family. It’s fair to say that both sides need to go deep, go beyond puppies and rainbows. Blog originally posted on www.sueschade.com.

Miriam Paramore interviewed Young as part of a series on Women in Health IT that she has titled “Women Who Get IT." In this inaugural interview, Paramore talks with Young not only about the work itself but also about work-life balance.

HIMSS VP: Disparity between male and female compensation rates has widened in the past decade.