Information Services and Systems Development Intern
During this internship, I learned about working with applications on a daily basis. I also learned the importance of patience and dealing with difficult people. I was tasked with providing assistance to doctors throughout Einstein Medical Center sites with the application Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical Edition. This application is a dictation tool that allows doctors, nurses, PAs, therapists, etc. to dictate their notes directly into their electronic medical records. It’s fast and allows them more time with their patients and less time typing notes. I had to help with errors that these users came across in Dragon. I also assisted in developing Dragon documentation for the help desk, helped install Dragon version 12 at various Einstein sites, and sat in on Dragon training sessions.
The users I dealt with on a week to week basis were not always friendly and/or appreciative of my help. I learned to deal with these difficult people by being patient and understanding. They would obviously be frustrated and annoyed with the software when it wasn’t working so I had to take their complaints and just do my job. I also learned that dealing with an application daily is tough. You need to find ways to fix common errors and be able to diagnose problems quickly.
The MIS concepts that were useful in this internship were some things discussed in Enterprise IT Architecture. We had to use flash research papers in order to find out how to deliver software using time management and cost effective techniques. In this internship I had to assist in finding ways in which to properly deploy the new version of Dragon to all of the Einstein sites. We had a few meetings discussing how and when to get to each site and how to properly install the software while not disturbing the doctors’ patient hours. This required me to take notes on the different sites throughout the organization and estimate the deployment time. Knowing about business rules, thanks to MIS 3504, also helped during this process. The rules governed which sites needed the software first, which sites had time crunches (ie: different hours, physicians working at multiple sites), and which sites could wait on the software for a little while.
Another concept discussed in Enterprise IT Architecture that was useful to me was downtime. When users would lose their ability to utilize Dragon and there were multiple issues throughout the different sites, I had to properly estimate the downtime cost in order to figure out who to assist first. For instance, I had two doctors at two different sites having errors with Dragon at the same time on a Monday morning. However, the first doctor to call in was located in Plymouth Meeting while the other doctor who called in just a little later was located about 15 minutes away from my office in NE Philadelphia. I knew that the doctor in NE Philly had a workaround, as he had a laptop to use Dragon on while his desktop Dragon was acting up. So, I headed out to Plymouth Meeting first and then circled back to help the doctor in NE Philly.
Einstein Healthcare Network is a private, not-for-profit organization with several major facilities and many outpatient centers. They provide quality healthcare and medical services to our community. Their primary mission is to provide compassionate, high-quality healthcare to the greater Philadelphia region.