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Spotlight

Chris Harris

Process Architect Strategist · Oracle Health

Specialization CCL · Reporting · Product Management · Learning & Development · Customer Onboarding
Experience 5+ years healthcare IT, Professional Scrum Master I
Continuous Managed Services

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."

One Report

Built one report to track code blue and rapid response incidents

The work

A Recent Engagement

I was recently on another engagement that had a similar lesson, just from a different angle. I was building a report that had gone through several iterations, not because the work was wrong, but because clinical workflows and processes kept evolving. That’s the reality of healthcare: things change. Priorities shift. Processes that were true when the requirements were written are not 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.

Another area I focus on, and have encouraged my team to do the same, is reducing the lift on the clinical side during testing and validation. When working with clinicians I seek to use existing data to make testing and validation 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • Stay curious about the problem.

    Instead of staying focused on the solution, especially when clinical workflows keep moving.

  • 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.

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