When Jacqueline Dailey, vice president and CIO, and James Levin, M.D., Ph.D., accepted the honor of the readers of Healthcare Informatics naming their team the Innovators of the Year earlier this year in the HCI Innovator Awards program , it not only capped years of pioneering HIT work in that organization; it inspired further advancement and activity.

Jacque Dailey spoke earlier this week with Mark Hagland, HCI ’s Editor-in-Chief, regarding what it meant to receive the first-place award in the Innovators program, and what has happened since then.

Healthcare Informatics: What was it like to receive the first-place award this February?

Jacqueline Dailey: What pops into my head immediately is how excited the organization was to be viewed as an innovator. That’s a huge word. So I think that overall, receiving that award creates a tremendous amount of enthusiasm in an organization, and helps people to separate some of the run-of- the-mill things we do every day from some of the things that may be exceptional. And that motivates everybody across the organization.

The second thing that winning earlier this year did for us as an IT organization and as an informatics organization, is that it really elevated the perspectives of both of those teams. I would categorize both of those teams as an elite crew of informaticists and IT people who really are thinking at a level that very few in the country are thinking at. Some of it has to do with the maturity of our information systems, but they’ve really grown a lot as well. So it was very motivating for them in particular. And people refer back to it a lot. They say, it’s going to be an innovation like the one in the ICU. And we had done enough ambulatory work to get us to a paperless state, but we’ve really needed to go back through and create some optimization. And Cerner [the Kansas City-based Cerner Corporation, the hospital’s core clinical vendor] had done made improvements that we needed to integrate. So one area is the in-between tracking—tracking the information returned back to the referring physician’s office. And we refer to that as the ‘next iAware’ innovation [referring to the innovation that helped Children’s win first place in the program]. We’re studying that very closely so we can work with Cerner on that. And our recognition in the Innovator Awards program really continues to inspire our work here.

HCI: Tell me about the culture of your organization, which is of the right sort to support this kind of innovation work.

Dailey: It all comes down to the fact that there is respect here for the multidisciplinary care of the patient. It all goes back to the fact that no one single person takes care of the patient; instead, it’s a whole team. And that’s the way we approach the electronic record system. And we know that when there’s a problem, it’s not one person’s problem. Really, that way of working has become the culture of the organization. We drove it through the e-record implementation, but it’s a culture of an organization that can evolve forward in a lot of different ways. And it’s just also that whole culture of respecting each other and treating each other with dignity. I was the executive speaker at our new employee orientation this morning, and I spent a lot of time on values. And that’s very important; when we select new people, we select them very carefully based on values.

HCI: With everyone across the industry focused on meaningful use, how does this kind of innovative work fit into that context?

Dailey: As I meet and speak with people across the country, there are people who are achieving meaningful use in very creative ways. And bringing those ideas out in ways that help people meet those requirements would align very directly with what David Blumenthal [National Coordinator for Health IT David Blumenthal, M.D.] and his people are trying to encourage. And sometimes maybe people don’t realize that something they’re doing to address meaningful use requirements is innovative, but it might be. And there’s no question that that’s top of mind right now for everyone.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Submissions for the 2011 HCI Innovator Award have been extended through Nov. 17. Nominate your team today!