#HITedu: Twitter Chat Topics & Thoughts with Host Amy Landry

If you build it, they will come? Not so much in health IT. Many health IT implementations have not succeeded because of one simple flaw: the software was either created, installed, or rolled out (often all three) with little clinical workflow in mind.

As educators, how do we ensure that students and those new to the health IT field are prepared to bridge the gap between the technical and clinical sides of the health informatics spectrum? We discussed this topic during our #HITedu chat on February 14th, 2017.

Meet our Twitter Chat host – Amy Landry, MS-HPM

Our host was Amy Landry (no relation to former Program Director Megan Landry), known on Twitter as @amyinmaine. Amy is the owner of Amy Landry Communications and offers marketing communications support to healthcare IT related organizations across the US. She’s worked in a variety of healthcare settings including hospital, ambulatory, payer, health IT vendor, and health policy oriented organizations.

#HITedu Twitter Chat host, Amy Landry, MS-HPM

“Learning about healthcare has been an interest of mine since childhood when I watched my mother receive many years of cancer treatments,” said Amy. “Though I knew early on I didn’t want to be a clinician, I did want to be involved in improving health and healthcare somehow.” So she instead earned degrees in communications and health policy and today applies her skills to promote organizations that improve population and individual health, and health care system improvement. “I only work with organizations whose mission I believe in,” she said.

Much of her career has focused on communicating the value and potential of health information technology to clinicians and patients. She’s led communications strategies related to the implementation and adoption of EHRs (Electronic Health Records), health information exchange, healthcare analytics, and health IT patient consent. While each effort was somewhat different, she noted a particularly memorable common thread.

“So much of communicating the value of health IT involves describing how it fits into and enhances a clinician’s workflow,” she said. “Clinicians are put under tremendous pressure to diagnose and treat patients in a finite amount of time. Any new software must make their job easier and benefit their patients, or they won’t use it.”

She said that clinical staff often want to know if the software was developed with clinical input. “If it wasn’t, that’s going to make it harder to roll out.” She went on to add that any reputable company should involve clinicians in any product design and implementation.

Lastly she added, “To take full advantage of their health IT systems and data, healthcare organizations need health informaticists to incorporate the use of these new and exciting technologies into the clinical workflow.”

For more information about the Health Informatics program at UNE Online, please go to online.une.edu/health-informatics. Or, for in depth questions about the program, feel free to call (855) 751-4445 or email an enrollment counselor at informatics@une.edu