To be a health care provider is to answer a calling. For some, the journey to health care is a straight line; for others, the road is winding. This series features stories from ECU Health team members who took the winding road, but found the destination to be worth the effort.
Karen Bolen, the director of inpatient clinical applications in the IS department of ECU Health, knew in high school that she wanted to be a nurse. After graduation, the West Virginia native worked as a bedside nurse and charge nurse in the emergency departments (ED) of several hospitals in West Virgina and Kentucky, and she also served as the manager of an ED. In early 2000, however, she had the opportunity to beta test an electronic health record (EHR) platform specific for the ED. That experience, which she thought was “really cool,” led Karen from the bedside to the world of health care information technology.
Seven years after that initial beta test, Karen’s organization announced their plans to adopt their own EHR. Her earlier experience with the software inspired her to inquire about transitioning from the bedside to working with the platform. “I was intrigued by the EHR, and as a new mom, working nights and on weekends didn’t do well for me. I asked about it, and I moved over to my new role in 2007,” she said. “I quickly realized this is where I wanted to be.”
Making this transition allowed Karen to leverage her education and extensive knowledge of the ED with building an effective and efficient EHR platform. “They were looking for nurses to build this EHR, which was Epic. I have a bachelor’s degree in nursing, and I use that every single day with what I do,” she said. “Because I had worked for many, many years in the ED, they chose me to build out the platform for the department.”
Working within electronic health records also merged Karen’s skillset as a nurse with her overarching desire to do good for the most people. “It was great because I could not only impact patients at the bedside, but I also impacted all the clinicians taking care of the patients, all of the ancillary departments and the community as well,” she explained. “I put my stethoscope down and picked up a laptop, but I didn’t lose anything by doing that. I still care for patients, and this enhances what I went to school for and what my passion is. I just do it in a different way.”
That training as a nurse was vital to creating the platform, but she also had to take classes specific to the EHR. “I knew how to save a life, I knew how to give medications and I knew how to provide education, but I didn’t know how to build an electronic health record. To do that, I took training classes, completed a project and passed a test. I also had to be certified in several different areas to complement my role as an application analyst,” she explained.
Karen relocated to ECU Health in 2017, where she joined a team that feels like a perfect fit. “They are the most amazing team ever,” she said. “I can wholeheartedly say that. They serve anything that falls within the halls of the hospital. We support not only the electronic health record, but also all the technologies that integrate with Epic, including fetal monitoring and the handheld rover application for on-the-go documentation. We have the most talented application analysts on our team.”
Karen is also responsible for supporting the ED, OR, anesthesia, pharmacy and ambulatory surgery. “I have an amazing team and great managers who supports those areas,” she said. “They teach me something new every single day. That’s one of the fun things about this role.”
That enthusiasm makes it easy for Karen to recommend a role in health care – whether it’s at the bedside or at the computer – to anyone. “When I was a beside nurse in the ED, I told people I had the coolest job ever. Now that I work in IS, I still have the coolest job ever,” Karen said. She also emphasized that anyone can work in the technology space. “We have people with a variety of backgrounds in our department. We have pharmacists, engineers, nurses and respiratory therapists. That diversity really complements those with information technology degrees and allows us to collaborate and share different perspectives and experiences to do something great. IT is in everything, and everything we do makes an impact.”
