How did you get into nursing?

I knew I wanted to study in a medical/science field and financial security was a necessity. My high school boyfriend’s father was a government hospital administrator and suggested that a nursing career would offer both job security and a career in medicine or the sciences.

I worked for 20 years doing clinical nursing and wanted to do something different. Admittedly, I was technically naive when I pursued new work, and computer literacy was not my strong suit.

I heard about Neoforma through a friend and e-mailed my résumé to one of the managers. She called me that afternoon for an interview. I wanted work that was linked with the computer industry even though my computer skills were limited.

Today, I interact with our developers, providing feedback to design and enhance our applications in order to meet our needs as well as our customers’. I use internal databases as well as Excel, Access, and more recently, WebEx for training sessions. I’ve learned so much since I started, a combination of on-the-job training and taking classes.

Q: What do you do?

I work behind the scenes, in the production environment, and provide feedback to help improve our product offerings.

This includes working and [communicating] with a team of 10 to 15 people positioned all across the country and in India. I work with nurses in New Jersey, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Some of them relocated from California but wanted to stay with Neoforma.

Our goal is to make ordering supplies easier and cost-efficient for health care facilities.

We provide the structure for a hospital worker to go online and hook up directly with a supplier to order products. This order, in turn, generates extensive information that is automatically fed back to the hospital. Through this process, reports are generated that include such data as what the available inventory is, how much is being spent including price discrepancies, and the status of the inhouse inventory.

A lot of our work is concentrated on standardizing and “cleaning” facilities’ item masters or “internal catalogs.” Most hospitals use materials management systems. The data we receive are often truncated, abbreviated, missing information, or incorrect. Different facilities have different terms for the same thing.

For example, a catheter is a “cath.”, or a “cth.”, or “cat.”; Kerlix gauze is not “Curlex.” Another example is that often a brand name for a specific type of gauze will be applied incorrectly to similar-type gauze.

One system may have a dash in the product number and the supplier uses no dashes. Once a product is “cleaned,” we classify it, which enables a hospital to track medical product use.

Many medical products and suppliers have incorrect information. The communication electronically fails with such discrepancies and valuable employee time is spent rectifying these problems. We work on having the product information consistent across the board, eliminating electronic failures to make better use of employees’ time.

How did you get into medical supply management?

My ideal was to bridge my nursing background with the computer industry. There has been a tremendous evolution in health care and I wanted to contribute. Additionally, I was often frustrated in trying to obtain medical equipment for my patients in an efficient manner when I worked in clinical nursing. There were continual overstocks and shortages on the unit.

How does nursing lend itself to this work?

I use the nursing process without thinking much about it. It’s so ingrained. I repeatedly use problem-solving, researching, and domain knowledge of medical products. We have a number of nurses with research or oncology backgrounds. That attention to detail is a desired skill.

What makes your work challenging?

We have a huge amount of data to assimilate within a given period of time. Different hospitals have different limitations and this forces us to readjust and process our data to meet their parameters.

As with patient case management, I have deadlines to meet while working collaboratively with the team and providing quality work.

Anything to add?

I facilitate the Children’s Art Wall project here at Neoforma to help our employees remain mindful of those we are serving, since we don’t directly interact with patients. We display art from pediatric patients and send pictures of their masterpieces to share with them, in return.

Many of those I work with retain that caring attitude that is part of our health care background. It is a must to keep the big picture in mind — that we are all working to improve health care — as I do my daily work.