Being an advocate for digital healthcare

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Picture: MercyAscot clinical informatics specialist Anna Marie Scroggins.

eHealthNews editor Rebecca McBeth

MercyAscot clinical informatics specialist Anna Marie Scroggins provides the link between digital health technology and clinicians so that consumers can benefit from it.

Anna Marie Scroggins sees her role as “bridging the gap between the IT world and the clinical world”.

She is a clinical informatics specialist at MercyAscot, where her brief is to “use information and technology to improve patient care and support the workforce to do that”.

She says key to her role is being an advocate for the end users of digital health systems.

“There is a narrative out there that clinical people are resistant to change but, in reality, they are dealing with change every day,” says Scroggins.

“They are resistant to technology that doesn’t work well for them so I’m a big advocate for making sure technology achieves this objective.”

Bringing clinicians on the digital journey

MercyAscot is predominantly paper-based but has just signed with InterSystems to implement the TrakCare patient administration and electronic medical record system.

Scroggins says staff engagement when embarking on a large digitisation project is critical, and part of her job is ensuring clinicians are included in the journey of moving the organisation’s clinical and administrative processes online.

Scroggins contributed to the development of the evaluation framework when assessing the potential EMR vendors in the procurement process, so was “really involved in defining the clinical needs for the organisation and ensuring staff are engaged and feel heard and listened to”.

“At the moment we’re mapping out processes, looking at hardware solutions and recruiting a project team, as we will need great people to come and make this happen with us,” she says.

There are also small pockets of digital innovation already in place, such as electronic discharge app Zedoc, that Scroggins worked to develop alongside nursing staff and supplier The Clinician.

Her input on projects such as this involves looking at whether a system will meet clinical requirements and whether the organisation has the capacity to implement it.

MercyAscot is also working to measure and improve the level of digital literacy among its staff, as it recognises the important role IT plays in their working lives.

“We have defined our view of digital literacy and the competencies under that and selected a tool to baseline all of our staff on their current core skills, like basic computer knowledge such as using email and browsing the web,” Scroggins says.

“This is to ensure the foundations are in place as we work to digitise, so they can use the tools we give them.”

The organisation is now working towards resourcing the learning and development team with digital literacy expertise.

Pathways

Scroggins says there is not a clear pathway for career development for clinical informatics roles.

“We have a skill set where people say, ‘that’s amazing, we need to harness you’, but to find a job that combines clinical practice and informatics is really rare, so this role is really amazing,” she says.

Scroggins was working as a children’s community nurse for Waitemata DHB, visiting children with complex health problems in their homes, when a “small cut-down EMR” was implemented in the service.

This gave her a taste of the benefits of recording clinical notes electronically, as everyone involved in the child’s care could see what the others were doing and were able to better coordinate care. She became a local champion for the system and trained new staff on how to use it.

“It was very organic. I never thought my career would go down this path, I just saw the value to the children and families and value to me as a nurse working in a really challenging field,” she says.

She started doing some post-graduate papers in health informatics and is now completing a Master of Health Informatics degree at Auckland University of Technology, where she is investigating the experience of the clinical workforce with technology and the use of open data standards.

Her next role was at Plunket, working on that organisation’s EMR programme, before moving on to MercyAscot.

An expanding role

Scroggins is the product owner for the widely used nursing staff software TrendCare and was originally hired to fill a role predominantly based around that, but, together with MercyAscot leadership, her scope has been broadened.

“The leadership here has really pushed for this role and it was key to have that executive sponsorship who saw how important it was and were willing to be very creative about how it came about,” she says.

Scroggins believes people in these informatics roles should come from medical, nursing and allied health backgrounds.

She started as an informatics nurse but is now called an informatics specialist and says her job is, “constantly morphing”, providing a huge amount of variability in her working day.

“This is the best job I’ve ever had in my life. I get to use my skill set every day to make a difference and to feel what I’m doing matters and gives real value to a job,” she says.

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