New Start; New Job

I'm about a month behind in my blogging.  So thought I had better catch up.

We've been anticipating big changes in PeaceHealth for awhile now.  My informatics team has been waiting to be "reorganized" for almost a year.  The decision was that the informatics team would become a system-wide team rather than local and would be working on the Epic Enterprise project--bringing in a new software program for the whole system of our hospitals in Oregon, Washington and Alaska.  Because of all the issues at our hospital though, the leadership insisted that we needed to keep an informatics presence at PeaceHealth Southwest.  I wasn't really interested in the type of work that I would have to do if I went to the system informatics team and it was going to require a lot of travel so I had pretty much decided I was going to stay at the hospital.  But my former director, knowing my aptitude and love of doing analyst type work encouraged me to apply for an Epic analyst position.  It was a long wait.  I applied at the beginning of August, interviewed at the end of August and was offered the job at the end of September.  Since I needed to start working my new job on October 6th, there was a quick transition of trying to figure out who would take over my various responsibilities and get them trained.  I am happy to be on the project though.  It is a huge job but it is exciting to be able to start something new. 

I thought I was going to be starting to work at the PeaceHealth Shared Service Center in Vancouver (pictured above) but as it turns out, they are preparing office space at our Memorial campus downtown.  Mixed feelings about it.  But it is what it is. 

Around the same time that I was working on transitioning my responsibilities, the article that our informatics team worked on was finally published at the end of September.  It was exciting for us to finally see it in "print".  The sad part was by the time it was published, the entire team had split up.  Rhonda is the manager for Nursing Informatics for the system, Alex has joined her, Jill has also joined her team but has moved back home to Cottage Grove, Amy decided to go back to working in the Family Birth Center, Lacey took over being the informatics manager at Southwest and I was going to the IT analyst team. 

Installing Epic means going to training in Wisconsin.  For my position, it means three weeks of training between October and December.  And then working on projects and studying in between so that I can pass the test and actually be allowed to be an Epic analyst.  I have always heard wonderful things about the Epic campus and I was not disappointed.  The Epic campus is located in Verona out in the country so you have views of Wisconsin farmland from the classrooms.  I only had time to explore a few buildings--the learning center where we had our classes was pretty amazing.  All the classrooms had a theme and were named for that theme.  For instance, my classroom was the Cyclops room of Odyssey.  There were super hero themes, Jame Bond, Star Wars, Clue, etc. just to name a few.  And the grounds were beautiful too.

 These are just a few pictures of the amazing training center.  There is art everywhere as well and the meals were pretty fantastic too.

All the office buildings have themes as well.  Being from Wisconsin, the office buildings that I was most interested in seeing were on "The Farm".  The Farm consisted of three big office buildings that were called The Barn, The Stable and The Shed and there was also the Farmer's Market there which was one of the cafeterias.  In those three office buildings were 980 offices just to give you an idea of the size.  Pretty cool!

I was so impressed with the attention to detail in the design and the decor of the buildings.  In the house portions, the office doors were just like doors you would find in an old farm house.  There were sitting rooms and areas that might look like a kitchen.  There was a creamery between the house and barn and I loved that they had huge milk bottles in their little kitchen area there with cool pictures and saying on them.  In the barn, there was the cow cutouts and Babe the Pig from Charlotte's Web.  The flooring in the barn looked like hay.  You crossed a neat wooden railroad like bridge to get to The Shed which had a '50's Farmall tractor in it.  Jill and I didn't really go into The Shed to see what the offices look like but we went through the Farmer's Market to get to The Stable.  The doors to the office there were like horse stall doors and instead of regular office name plates, they were horse ribbons with their names on.  And the carpeting looked like cobblestones.

I'm getting ready to go back next week for more training.  I might check out a few more buildings or the tree house.  We'll see what I have time for.  But it was a really Epic experience.  And the training was pretty wonderful too.