Nurses Month Member Spotlight: C. J. Garst, MSN, RN, NI-BC, CPHIMS

May is National Nurses Month, a time to honor and celebrate the incredible work of nurses. HIMSS is celebrating its members who are on the front lines every day.

What is the organization of your employment?

Advocate Health

What is your current position?

Director of Advanced Analytics

Tell us more about your background.

Throughout my career as a Nurse Informaticist I have been fortunate to be an early adopter of several of the emerging trends in the field. After graduating with my Bachelor’s degree from Clemson University in 2001, I worked at the bedside in both ICU and the ED. I have always loved computers, from the Commodore 64 days to today, and I have kept my skills as an advanced hobbyist. In 2005 I started seeing a multitude of vendors coming in and showing their products. Most of them were clearly designed by people with no idea what clinicians do or how we do it. I tried to get involved but lacked the network or credentials to be taken seriously. So, I returned to school to pursue a Master’s in Nursing Informatics at Duke University. Upon graduation in December of 2006, I quickly was accepted into an entry level position as an informaticist. From 2006 to 2013 I had the wonderful experience of building, testing, and implementing a modern EMR, with all of the bell-and-whistles of the day, including CPOE, barcode medication administration, best practice alerts, data interchange with other EMRs, and everything in between. This started two years before the Hi-Tech Act made people in my role much more commonplace.

After having implemented this technology at multiple hospitals and moving into more of a support and enhancement role, I began to fully understand the power of data. I began to conclude the power of my job wasn’t so much making the lives of nurses and other clinicians easier by making technology work for them, though that is important. Instead, I began to see what the power of data in decision making and patient care could do. I took a keen interest in advocating for better reports and analytics. I think I bothered the Reporting and Analytics team so much that their VP finally asked me to become a director for him so we could achieve greater things. In 2013 I accepted this challenge knowing nothing about reporting and little about analytics, except that what the technical team was doing was suboptimal. Instead of a new degree to transition me to the new space, I had to rely on my Informatics skills, as I spend many hours in the evenings and weekends learning the technical ins-and-outs of Reporting and Analytics. Even before I had those new skills sharpened, just leveraging my Nursing Informatics knowledge improved our products greatly. We started organizing and creating a well thought out library of reports. We partnered with the clinicians to understand their clinical priorities and developed analytics so that they could measure their success and identify areas of opportunities.

My career in Reporting and Analytics has included Clinical, Revenue Cycle, Quality, and Cost. Each one of those is a specialty unto itself, not unlike a clinical specialty. While I don’t encounter many other nurses working in this space, it is ripe for expansion. The technical teams are greatly skilled, but they don’t have the Informatics skills needed to maximize the potential of their work while minimizing the amount of rework. Some Informaticists ask if I am really an Informaticist. Well, I use all 17 Standards delineated in the Nursing Informatics Scope and Standards of Practice (3rd edition) and several not listed. Some ask if a nursing license is required for my job. No, but then again, in 2006 it wasn’t either. (And they didn’t call us Nurse Informaticists.) I maintain my license, and I am a nurse. My education, experience, and credentials should make that self-evident. Reporting and Analytics is a great space, and one not well served by RNs. I hope more will join me!

Is there a leader you follow for inspiration? Or is there a nursing leader that has inspired your career?

Linda Goodwin was my advisor in graduate school. She encouraged me so much to follow my interests, even when they were unorthodox. We were talking about handheld gaming one time and wondered if it could be leveraged for nurses in some way. I turned that into a capstone project where I developed a way to put nursing education lectures in a PlayStation Portable (PSP). She encouraged me not to limit myself to what was common and readily available to me, but to use tools the industry wasn't using and to do common things in an uncommon way. I have run into so many great leaders along the way, some nurses, some not and I try to learn something new from each of them.

What characteristics describe a strong nursing informatics leader?

Nurses are the masters of getting stuff done. A strong informatics leader sets the vision of what needs to be done, provides the tools to do it, then helps remove roadblocks that are preventing the task from being successful. They encourage and support creative problem solving and creating the future. 

How do you leverage mentorship and guidance from experienced informaticists to further your career and skill set?

I view the reporting and analytics space as the other side of the coin from the traditional informatics space. In order to be successful, I have to work with informatics leaders developing new tools. I can also tell them the issues I am having and the data I need to be more successful so that they can design that into the front-end. Experienced informaticists are able to project the strengths and weaknesses of new technologies and can separate marketing hype from clinical effectiveness.

In what ways do you see ongoing professional development benefiting the broader nursing informatics community and advancing the field as a whole?

Professional development is key for all nurses. Our field is changing so fast that we cannot rely purely on experience though we can let experience be a guide. I see professional development as helping keep me current with technological advances, I see it promoting innovation as I learn more about new technology and think of ways it can be leveraged. It helps support evidence-based practice, which enhances both informatics and clinical practice.

Nurses Month is sponsored by BD.