BIZTECH: Let’s go back to almost a year ago. What was the atmosphere like at North Valley when the pandemic first began, and what were some of the immediate challenges that you were facing?
BENSON: We had a lot of things going on. We’re in a very rural part of Minnesota, so we were really trying to identify the different ways that this was going to change how we took care of patients. We quickly found out that the way we were doing things wasn’t necessarily going to support what our patients needed. For example, we had to figure out how we were going to do something like drive-through COVID-19 testing, and we did not have a way to do that. We did have an ambulance drive-through garage, which we tried to retrofit for testing. So we were trying to figure out how we were going to move our patient care into an environment like that.
BIZTECH: How has using some of those tools and solutions affected North Valley’s long-term IT strategy?
BENSON: What we learned early on was that communication was incredibly important across multiple disciplines. We’re a small facility, so we’ve always had the luxury of fast communication channels between departments and layers of the organization. What we found was that it’s going to be incredibly important going forward, which shouldn’t be a shocking statement, but when you’re trying to get things done fast and maybe outside of a normal workflow, it becomes much more important to communicate and maintain that. Even though it is an IT-driven project, it very rarely is just an IT project alone. And having that communication and that flexibility, we are much more aware that the project that we do today may be repurposed or adapted to fit a larger need in the future.
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BIZTECH: What have you been hearing from fellow employees at North Valley? Are they really embracing these new tools?
BENSON: I think they are. And I think that’s a product of the fact that they were involved in figuring out the solutions. There was never a time when I walked into a meeting or jumped on a call with someone and said, “This is what we’re doing, you know, buckle up. This is it.” Almost every kind of workflow change we had to make, our nurses, our medical staff, lab technicians — everybody was involved in figuring out how we were going to address the problems and challenges that they were facing. That's really where we started with everything. What are the challenges that they are going to be seeing? And then once we understand that, it can help to figure out some ideas.