Even years later, I still consider it my biggest professional failure: a company-wide employee training program that I’d developed and put through several rounds of vetting was shot down at the last minute. It was a painful surprise, and it changed the way I’ve sought support for new initiatives ever since.
As hospitals increasingly migrate their medical records from paper files to digital media, their employees face the challenge of making the information readily accessible to providers while adequately protecting patients’ privacy. At my hospital, I was a senior vice president with a long track record of establishing successful programs, and I had oversight responsibility for my hospital’s IT and Health Information departments.
To make sure our 23,000+ employees were up to date on the industry rules, policies, and procedures they were legally required to be familiar with, my department heads and I created a robust training program. We went well beyond the minimum that the law required, creating a curriculum rooted in industry best practices. We could have just printed out a thick informational packet to give to each employee, but we knew the training program had a much greater chance of being effective. And we gave the program a catchy name to top it off.
