Now more than ever, networking is key to getting ahead, especially for women in health IT. Whether through co-workers and relationships, or via social media, face-to-face events and other virtual connections, you are building relationships that can help you succeed, support your work and transform health.

A colleague or mentor may be able to recommend you for career advancement. Perhaps a contact has a lead that may help you close a deal. A key contact may be able to share a best practice that could improve workflow at your organization. Your network surrounds you – it’s up to you to cultivate relationships that can move your career forward.

What #WomenInHIT Colleagues are Saying

“The power of networking can’t be overstated and it shouldn’t be underestimated. It is one of the most valuable skills you can possess. Like any skill, it needs to be used on a consistent basis so as not to get rusty. It’s certainly been instrumental in my professional growth within the world of health IT. And the best part of it is, not only does networking help you during times of career transition, but it can also lead to some really wonderful, lasting friendships.”

– Jenn Dennard, founder, HealthITChicks; part of the HIMSS Women in Health IT initiative

“Networking is an art of consent and consistent maintenance to connect within/out of one’s tribe. Everyone’s process is different to connect and network. The process for myself started with continuing my education and going from being a novice in health tech, not knowing where to start, to building a following through my daily research shared on my personal website. Networking on social media via Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram: I found my tribe. I have been consistently writing blog posts, curating content and attending Tweet chats. After building a following, I then turned online acquaintances into face-to-face connections at HIMSS local and national events. As a woman in tech, you have to be consistent with the process of building genuine online and offline connections. The world is large but the health technology community is rather compact and bridging global connections are so important to meet, mentor and source supporters to climb the ladder. Women can support others; and men are needed as well if you want to build a diverse networking group. HIMSS is global and the sky is the limit to connect on the local, national and international level. The art of building a network takes time, patience and planning. No one wants to listen to you when you have a limited number of social media followers. The hardest is getting to your first 2,000 followers, hence building your network within the HIMSS community is a great place to start. Subscribing to the official HIMSS Twitter account, following the ‘registration hashtags’ and the people that follow those is a logical first step.”

– Danielle Siarri, MSN, RN, nursing informatics specialist, lead publisher at InnoNurse.info; part of the HIMSS Social Media Ambassador initiative

«Healthcare IT needs better communication and networking has allowed me to connect with like-minded experts to improve patient care. I have been amazed at the ability to find experts through networking on social media to solve healthcare problems. Several months ago I had a question about social determinants of health for veterans in rural areas. I didn’t know who was an expert in the space so I asked on Twitter. Within an hour I was connected with a leader at the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, learning about what they cared about. Getting better information to the right people faster should be facilitated by healthcare technology. The stronger our network, the easier it is to get things done and improve healthcare.»

– Janae Sharp, founder, Sharp Index; part of the HIMSS Social Media Ambassador initiative

As the saying goes … «It’s not what you know, but rather who you know,” so get out there and network!

There’s No Better Place to Network Than HIMSS

Women in Health IT Roundtable

Join us in addressing the gender gap in health IT, and the need for more community, resources and recognition of women in the industry

#WomenInHIT

Join the #WomenInHIT conversation

HIMSS19

Plan to attend our various Women in Health IT events during the HIMSS Global Conference & Exhibition for face-to-face networking. Learn more | Register

 

Last week, Calvary Mater Newcastle Hospital in New South Wales (NSW), Australia became the 17th Intensive Care Unit (ICU) across the state to replace paper charting with Electronic Record for Intensive Care (eRIC), which digitally integrates patient data from bedside monitors, ventilators and other specialised equipment every minute. With this latest go live, more than a third of NSW’s 44 ICU hospitals are onboard the eRIC clinical information system.

The electronic Record for Intensive Care (eRIC) is an electronic clinical information system within an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) that integrates patient data every minute from multiple systems, to improve patient safety and provide better clinical decision-making.

“eRIC will cut manual documentation work, which is very time consuming,” said Kelly Duff, Clinical Nurse Educator and Change Manager at Calvary Mater. “With eRIC, we expect that documentation and compliance will improve, resulting in fewer mistakes relating to these.”

Calvary Mater Newcastle is the major cancer care centre for the Hunter New England Local Health District, delivering more than 320,000 occasions of outpatient services and in excess of 16,000 inpatient treatments per year.

In October 2016, Port Macquarie Base Hospital (PMBH) was selected as the first ICU in NSW to deploy eRIC. Subsequently, there were eight hospital deployments of eRIC in 2017 and this year, there were nine hospital deployments, including the latest deployment by Calvary Mater Newcastle Hospital. Including Calvary Mater’s ICU, 345 beds in 17 health facilities across nine Local Health Districts (LHDs) have been enabled with eRIC as part of the ongoing digital transformation of NSW Health.

Deployments of eRIC will continue in 2019, starting with Gosford Hospital and Wyong Hospital in Central Coast LHD. eRIC will also be introduced next year in the ICUs of St Vincent’s Private Hospital within South Eastern Sydney LHD, Broken Hill Base Hospital in Far West LHD and Nepean Hospital in Nepean Blue Mountains LHD.

 

Biofourmis, a Singapore-based health analytics platform, has entered into a collaboration with Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, US to co-develop improvements to their proprietary analytics engine, Biovitals™ for Brigham’s Home Hospital Programme.

Patients are cared for in their home instead of the hospital in Brigham’s Home Hospital Programme, with the aim of providing the right care to the patient at the right time and place. The Programme started in November 2016 and about 200 patients have been cared for from home so far.

The process

After a patient has been discharged from the hospital, a doctor or nurse meets the patient at his or her home and all diagnostic work are performed at home, such as blood tests, X-rays and ultrasounds. The patient’s vitals including heart and respiratory rate, as well as movement are monitored 24/7 with wireless monitoring technology.

The patient is given an electronic tablet that allows him or her to communicate anytime with medical staff via phone, text or on-demand video. Many treatments, including medications, are administered at a patient’s bedside. Preliminary pilot data of nine patients who were randomised to receive care at home showed that the average direct cost for acute care episodes for home patients was up to half of the cost of the control patients cared for in the hospital.

The collaboration between Biofourmis and Brigham and Women’s Hospital will harness and clinically utilise the vast quantity of biometric data that the home hospital team collects. The team plans use the Biovitals™ analytics engine and further innovate around new predictive algorithms. Unlike traditional threshold-based physiology monitoring, Biovitals™ uses advanced machine learning to learn a patient’s physiology and then dynamically build a personalised physiology signature that can detect subtle physiological changes that may predict a patient’s health. The programme would also use Biofourmis’ RhythmAnalytics™ platform to detect dozens of different cardiac arrhythmias.

“Current remote monitoring systems are based on univariate physiology analysis and have shown high false alarm burden and no early intervention, especially while monitoring patients in an ambulatory setting. This collaboration would enable us to enhance and co-develop new predictive models for monitoring acutely ill patients’ suffering from multiple conditions like heart failure, pneumonia, COPD, and atrial fibrillation at-home, enabling clinicians to intervene early and improve the level of safety of patients,” said Kuldeep Singh Rajput, Founder & CEO of Biofourmis.

“Our home hospital team is hoping to improve care for our patients by creating a suite of highly clinically-useful algorithms that can predict deterioration and improvement for those who are acutely ill,” said David Levine MD, MPH, MA, researcher and lead for Brigham and Women’s Home Hospital programme.

In December 2017, Biofourmis announced that it had raised US$5.0 million in a Series A round of funding from NSI Ventures and Aviva Ventures, the strategic corporate venture arm of international insurer, Aviva plc. The company also entered into a collaboration with Mayo Clinic, which would enable them to assess de-identified healthcare data from clinical trials and Mayo’s expert medical insights.

 

Researchers from Germany and Finland have shown that so-called “brown fat” interacts with the gut hormone secretin in mice to relay nutritional signals about fullness to the brain during a meal. The study, appearing November 15 in the journal Cell, bolsters our understanding of a long-suspected role of brown adipose tissue (BAT) — a type of body fat known to generate heat when an animal is cold — in the control of food intake.

“We demonstrate a connection between the gut, the brain, and brown tissue, uncovering a previously unknown facet of the complex regulatory system controlling energy balance,” says lead author Martin Klingenspor, chair of molecular nutritional medicine at the Technical University of Munich. “The view of brown fat as a mere heater organ must be revised, and more attention needs to be directed towards its function in the control of hunger and satiation.”

During a meal, signals encoded by gut hormones reach the brain via the blood or through nerves activated in the small intestine. The work by Klingenspor and colleagues indicates that the gut hormone secretin — first recognized in 1902 to stimulate the pancreas to secrete bicarbonate to help the small intestine neutralize acid and digest macronutrients — has an underappreciated role in satiation.

In their study, hungry mice that were injected with secretin had suppressed appetites. Injecting mice with secretin also increased the amount of heat that their brown fat produced. Mice with inactivated brown fat tissue, however, didn’t experience the same appetite suppression when they were injected with the hormone — suggesting that it is secretin’s effect on BAT that causes the feeling of fullness.

In addition to studying the effects of secretin on brown fat in mice, secretin levels were measured in 17 human volunteers. In a study in Finland, brown-tissue oxygen consumption and fatty-acid uptake were measured in participants’ blood after overnight fasting and 30-40 minutes after a meal. Researchers found that higher levels of secretin in the subjects’ blood corresponded to more metabolically active brown fat.

Klingenspor says that one day, we may know enough about the secretin-brown fat connection to stimulate secretin production by eating certain foods. “Any stimulus that activates brown fat thermogenesis could potentially induce satiation,” he says. “Secretin secretion is sensitive to nutrients, so eating the right starter could be helpful in promoting satiation and result in reduced meal size and caloric intake.”

He believes that brown fat’s roles in controlling hunger and satiation make it a particularly attractive target for new approaches to treating obesity. Targeting brown fat through secretin might hold promise for potential future nutritional or pharmacological interventions against obesity and metabolic disease, he says.