Introducing Lisa Stephenson, Houston Methodist’s first chief nursing informatics officer.
On Sept. 19, Houston Methodist welcomed Lisa Stephenson, MSN, RN-BC, as our first chief nursing informatics officer (CNIO) and the newest member of the IT senior leadership team. With more than 20 years’ nursing experience, including 10 years in progressive clinical informatics leadership, Lisa brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to her role.
Lisa joins HM from the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, where she served as the nursing informatics administrator and oversaw several critical projects, including COVID-19 testing and vaccine changes. We recently sat down with Lisa to learn more about her vision and plans as the first CNIO at HM.
As a nurse with an emergency department background, what sparked your interest in health care IT?
I grew up in California’s Silicon Valley area, technology has always been a passion of mine and some of my first jobs were with technology companies. However, I wanted to feel like I was making a difference and nursing became a calling for me. Ironically, I ended up in nursing informatics by default. I was progressing in nursing leadership roles as I really wanted to support and serve nurses at the bedside. While I was a manager of a medical/surgical unit, we experienced an unplanned downtime with our electronic health record, and I worked on a project to ensure we had the tools and plans if it happened again. After this, a leader at my hospital approached me to be the nursing informaticist.
Bridging my interests in technology and nursing through informatics enables me to focus on ensuring clinicians have the tools needed to do their jobs with the goal of providing them more time at the bedside for patient care. I enjoy helping to streamline processes and using data and information to do this. It’s what informatics is all about. Plus, I still feel like I’m really helping to serve clinicians.
How can we use technology to address the challenges that nurses face?
Nurses are at the heart of any health care organization. My role is to shine the spotlight on the challenges we know nurses face, like staffing shortages and documentation inefficiencies, and to develop solutions that help our clinicians work more efficiently and spend more time with our patients.
Epic produces reports that can support us in this effort. These reports help us find efficiency opportunities that can make life easier for our nurses. In addition, establishing systemwide guidelines around nursing documentation can help ensure we only present nursing with the flowsheets they need to complete. We look at these documentation workflows and ask, “What makes the most sense in the course of our nurses’ daily work? What system alerts or automation can be used? What integrations with other devices might help?”
It’s important that we’re listening to our nurses and clinicians. That’s a large part of my role ─ to listen to feedback from our clinicians and work together with them to bring about new, positive solutions. Our informatics team is an important catalyst for this. As we introduce new technologies and change existing processes, we must continue to solicit feedback on our continual pathway to excellence.
How do you see technology and health care IT evolving in a post-COVID-19 environment? What might we see five years from now?
A goal of clinical informatics is for everything to interact seamlessly. We want to use technology to help nurses focus more on the patient, instead of all the different systems, tools and applications they use.
Fortunately, this is an exciting time for health care IT. Traditionally, our industry has been behind others in adopting new technologies, but that is starting to change. The COVID-19 pandemic opened our eyes to some significant nursing needs, and now we’re able to capitalize on some cutting-edge technology and partnerships to develop tools and resources that are better for patients, clinicians and hospital operations.
Making workflows more efficient through automation is a major focus right now. Through device integration and voice-activated technologies, we’re finding opportunities to help with documentation workflows. Meanwhile, teleheath and virtual nurse support tools can supplement direct nursing contact in some cases, like responding to some patient requests; or enabling bedside nurses to be more present for their patients by completing some documentation and assessment tasks virtually.
Over the next five years, I think we’ll be a lot more mobile. Mobile tools, like Rover and Vocera, along with other ambient voice technologies, can improve provider and clinician communication, chart review and on-the-go documentation to support efficiencies.
What led you to Houston Methodist?
Houston Methodist has a great reputation for clinical care. There’s also a real dedication and commitment to achieve excellence. As I’ve met with leaders and staff, I’ve enjoyed the interactions and a shared vision of the future that utilizes digital technology and innovation to enhance patient outcomes.
The fact that Houston Methodist is putting an additional focus on nursing is also very positive. The CNIO position is new, but the challenges and obstacles nurses face aren’t. Bringing in someone with a nursing and informatics background will help usher in technologies to make a positive difference. I’m excited about what lies ahead on this journey.
