My job now is certainly not glamorous or high powered, it’s anything but that! However it was what I needed in my life when I exited the administrative ranks about 5 years ago. After the pressure of my last administrative job where I built a hospital — yes, built from ground up with 5 am budget meetings, administrative staff meetings each week until 9 pm — I realized my health and sanity (clinical depression) were suffering and I needed a change. Not ashamed to admit it, I am just glad there are treatments for it!

So I entered the world of consulting…

This was great — set my own hours, loved the travel, etc. But when I realized that the interior of a Hampton Inn seemed more like my home than my home did — it was time for another change.

Objectively looking at what I liked about my previous jobs I realized that a lot of what I did in both the administrative side and the consulting side was to EDUCATE people. Educate them on the potential of products purchased, educate them on new technologies to consider, educating on ROI, educating people on utilizing what they had already purchased to the fullest… Hmm, wonder what these things had in common???

So, I made a career change and now work as an educational consultant for a large hosptial corporation. (wonder who that could be?) My day job is teaching people how to use the systems our corporation has purchased to improve patient care. It is not so much about “push this button to do this” but to take a look at how they can better utilize the system and extract the data entered into the system to provide information. (Data by itself is not Information!).

I concentrate in the technical areas of data extraction, operating systems, security and interface education. I get to come in the morning, do my job, and leave work behind when I exit the door. My pay is not in the stratosphere, but I do get paid well for my work and actually make close to the pay from my last administrative job. I will say that my HOURLY RATE is the highest in my career when you actually calcuate pay divided by hours worked!

Sometimes I really do miss being on the front lines of healthcare in an actual hospital and being able to influence the use of technology but then I think of everything that goes with that and am happy with my life now. When I miss the other stuff more, I may well go back into healthcare adminstration.

Take care!

John was always a very classy guy and remembered my name from conference to conference even though my organization was just a community hospital and my budget was just a fraction of his organization’s.

As much as he makes the CIO role out to be sooooo glamorous, I am still happy with my career change! I actually have a life now!

Love the commentary!! Thanks for participating!