Spotlight
Chris Harris
Process Architect Strategist · Oracle Health
The Moment
What I do when it matters most
A while back I got a message from a physician asking me to call his cell when I was free. I picked up my pen and paper ready to take notes readying myself to hear what needed to change. But that’s not what happened. He wanted to thank me. Not through a ticket. Not through a satisfaction survey. A personal call to say he appreciated the work I had done.
The work was a report I built to track code blue and rapid response incidents. Data that lives right at the intersection of patient safety and operational efficiency. The kind of data that, when it’s visible and trustworthy, impacts and informs decisions.
I didn’t just build what was in the request. I spent time engaging with him. I spent time understanding what decisions he was trying to make, what he was working around because the data didn’t exist in a usable form, what useful meant from where he sat. Not from an IT perspective, but from the perspective of someone responsible for patient safety and clinical operations. Those interactions became the fingerprints of what I built.
"The difference, when the work really lands, is almost always the relationship. It's whether you took the time to understand the person on the other side, asked the questions that weren't in the requirements, and stayed curious about the problem instead of just focused on the solution."
Built one report to track code blue and rapid response incidents
The work
A Recent Engagement
I’m in the middle of another engagement right now that’s been teaching me a similar lesson, just from a different angle. I’m building a report that has gone through several iterations, not because the work was wrong, but because clinical workflows and processes have been evolving. That’s the reality of healthcare: things change. Priorities shift. A process that was true when the requirements were written isn’t always true by the time you’re building against them.
I avoided a hard stop. We kept iterating. I stayed in motion alongside the customer and their needs, adjusting as the clinical picture evolved. No new requests. No hard stops to rescope and re-baseline. Just continued work in service of getting to the right answer. The customer isn’t spending time on process overhead. Instead, they’re spending time on the work that matters in the moment.
The other thing I’ve been focused on is reducing the lift on the clinical side during testing and validation. I’ve been working directly with clinicians to figure out how we can use existing data to make testing easier. Finding ways to structure validation so they can do it themselves, without having to engage others to perform tasks that don’t serve the clinical outcome. The goal is simple: deliver the right solution while minimizing the amount of work required from everyone else to get there.
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Treat the conversation as part of the work itself. This isn’t overhead to get through before the real build. It is the part that determines whether what you build is useful.
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Ask the questions that were not in the requirements: what decisions is this person trying to make, and what are they working around because the data doesn't exist in a usable form?
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Stay curious about the problem instead of staying focused on the solution, especially when clinical workflows keep moving.
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Figure out how to take work off the clinical team's plate instead of adding to it. When you ask too much of them, you slow down the work and risk the relationship.
what it takes
Advice for Success
In healthcare IT the technical problem isn't the hardest part. What can be challenging is staying close enough to the people involved so that you can see the real problem clearly, identify outcomes that matter, and stay flexible enough to adapt through all the evolutions and iterations.