Jennifer Wesson Greenman builds bridges across healthcare IT
In many ways, Jennifer Wesson Greenman deeply understands the importance of connectedness. The SIM Tampa Bay vice president and president-elect serves as the chief information officer for the Atlanta, Chicago and Phoenix markets of City of Hope, a national network of cancer hospitals and clinics.
She plays a vital role in connecting City of Hope with anyone battling cancer.
“Fundamentally, City of Hope’s cancer care … is about bringing discovery – the latest and greatest therapies and diagnostics – to patients, regardless of where they're located across the country,” she explained. “[It’s called] the democratization of cancer care. And that is important because there’s a lot of disparities in cancer care that very much impact outcomes.
“So our goal as an enterprise is to democratize cancer care so that regardless of where you live – whether you’re in an urban area, rural area – [and] regardless of your background or socioeconomic status, you're able to access care that meaningfully improves your journey.”
Such care aims to both extend and improve the quality of patients’ lives. While her employer connects patients with cancer care, Wesson Greenman connects its physicians, scientists, administrators and other staff with highly specialized IT services.
She and her colleagues manage and deliver technology services for City of Hope’s hospitals and clinics. In total, they are responsible for over 200 unique applications, including direct care delivery systems, diagnostic-therapeutic treatment delivery systems, business applications and revenue cycle management. They also provide the technology infrastructure that supports and enables those applications in a sophisticated environment.
“The nomenclature and conceptual frameworks that we operate within are very complex in oncology,” she said. “ … So there’s significant cognitive burden placed on our user community that must be reflected in the technologies that we support.”
The tech expert and her team strive to minimize those burdens by considering the host of variables that factors into clinical healthcare workflows. Unlike in other industries, the decision-making process in healthcare is often not linear or straightforward, but instead is multidimensional and “usually highly noisy,” said Wesson Greenman. City of Hope’s highly trained practitioners undergo extensive education in preparation for making these challenging decisions.
As always, Wesson Greenman remains focused on connection. In her main endeavor, she seeks to integrate her organization’s technology systems and services with its enterprise system. She is specifically focused on transitioning the system to a common electronic health record and patient management and billing system, which she called a “state-of-the-art, best-of-breed” application platform.
In some ways, SIM Tampa Bay’s next president is reaping the rewards of the relationships she has formed through the professional society.
“I have [benefited] tremendously from the relationships and … broader knowledge across industries of … the practice of technology and how it's applied universally.”
Wesson Greenman also cherishes the opportunities for networking and shared learning that SIM membership has afforded her. Many of her fellow SIM members in healthcare IT have networked with IT professionals outside of their field, thereby differentiating industry-specific practices from more common practices.