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| Peggy has left the building. |
International Women's Day – March 8th, 2012. A day to highlight
the plight of women around the globe and to promote equality. Why are we not
there already?
A day to celebrate mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, grandmothers, cousins,
nieces, granddaughters and those whom we work with side by side daily.
So, how fitting it is, we celebrate on this day and say farewell to one of
the most dedicated and gifted Women in #HealthIT. A trailblazer for the EMR.
Someone with the EMR vision long before Meaningful Use was a twinkle in someone’s
eye.
Margaret “Peggy” Gray began her role in Health IT nearly 25 years ago.
Peggy was working on the design, build and deployment of a multidisciplinary bedside
clinical documentation system all the way back in the late 1980’s and early
1990’s. This was the time when most hospital systems processed your admission
and bill on a huge mainframe that did little if anything to assist the clinicians.
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| Peggy testing ADT interface 1994 |
Clinical areas were supplied with 15 part NCR forms, Addressographs and
hundreds of tin plates with patient demographics stamped on them. The Stoneage of
#HealthIT. The #Un-meaningful Use days.
We partnered with a start-up company who was interested in developing a clinical
documentation system for hospitals. Peggy was handpicked by the CNO to
represent the needs of the clinical departments. She spent thousands of hours co-developing
the product with the company and her team.
Often Peggy would run to the local school, pick up kids, bring them to
work, get them some food, crayons, paper and a place to sit and get back to
designing and developing admission screens, H&P queries, vital signs logs, flow
sheets and reports.
In the early 90’s we implemented bedside terminals on one of the patient
care floors. VT-100s at each bedside connected back to a XENIX server. It wasn’t
pretty and no, there was no mouse or even a light pen. But it was a step in the
right direction. Away from illegible handwritten documentation to online
documentation.
As time went on, Peggy would be tasked to replace her homegrown system for
a fully integrated HIS. She wasn't too thrilled about throwing away all the
development work she and her team had done. In fact, the work they did was quite
useful in designing and building the new screens and reports on the integrated
EMR.
From 1994 to today, Peggy and her peers designed, implemented and supported
an EMR that in April 2009 was recognized as the 1st HIMSS Analytics Stage
6 EMR in the State of CT and the 36th in the nation. She and the team implemented Bedside
Medication Verification and more recently bedside phlebotomy.
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| Peggy (clown) demos EMR during Clinical Documentation Fair |
Of course Peggy did not do all this on her own. Nor was she the one hauling
in Cisco switches, lighting up SAN storage arrays, building the GL, scheduling
module and Citrix servers. But Peggy was the constant force driving the
clinical portions of our EMR.
With tears and hugs plentiful throughout the department ,we bid Peggy a
farewell as she rides off to new and greater challenges with a new start-up
#HealthIT firm in the area. No doubt they will benefit highly from her passion
for excellence and many years of experience in the clinical settings.
We…I am deeply grateful for the sacrifices she has made over these 25 years
to bring us to where we are today which has well prepared us for our future.
God Bless Peg!
