Blogs

We sat down with Kumar Kedre from Grand Island Regional Medical Center to discuss his current role, his experiences and where he sees things going in the future of imaging.

Name:  Kumar Kedre  (Enterprise Imaging Systems Administrator)

Facility:  Grand Island Regional Medical Center (Nebraska, USA)

Products Used:

• Enterprise Imaging – Change Healthcare Radiology Solutions 14.0
• Enterprise Imaging – Change Healthcare Cardiology Solutions 14.2

 
What is one thing you wish you knew sooner that you now know in your current role?

When I started at this facility, I didn’t know Change Healthcare PACS, so that would’ve been helpful!  But I had a lot of other PACS background and experience.  Now that I have Change Healthcare PACS experience under my belt, that can be added on to my experience and make additional implementations easier in the future.

What is the hardest thing about your current role?

It really comes back to vendor management and working with so many vendors.  I support all imaging, which includes Cardiology, Radiology and anything imaging-related.  So I have to deal with all the different vendors, not just Change Healthcare.  We need all the vendors in order to make the system work and provide services for the patient.  Meeting the various vendors’ SLAs, dealing with multiple Support Portals, etc. is challenging.  Imagine!  Walking into the Apple store and not being able to get your laptop, iPad, headset, etc. at the same time.  Imagine that instead you have to go to Walmart for one thing, Best Buy for another, etc.  Not having a one stop shop for everything makes things challenging.  I need to go to multiple companies to make our various systems work correctly for our users.

What is something you love about your position and your day-to-day tasks?

What I love about my job is being able to contribute to patient care and healthcare, as well as the contribution to the community.  It’s also really cool being able to learn all the new technology and learning the various clinical applications.  So making a contribution and having a positive impact on patient care are what I love, as well as to never stop learning.

What changes would make your role easier?  This can be subjective, workflow, product based…

If I had anything I could change or improve upon, I would love to have a unified monitoring system / dashboard where I can see everything that’s going on with our system.  That includes interface issues, communication issues between vendors, volume reporting, bug reporting, proactive monitoring and so on.  Having that sort of dashboard reporting and unified system that controls and monitors every system would mean I wouldn’t need to toggle between multiple systems looking for errors or issues.  I could simply look at a single dashboard that would provide what I need for my primary role is which is resolving issues and taking care of urgent / critical items and outages. 

What trends do you see developing in your area that you think are going to positively impact your role / institution / specialty / patients/ etc.?

Going along with the same topic of online training, nowadays everything is online.  Having remote options available to us has made a huge difference with our facility’s training and support.  We don’t have to fly anymore, and we can be available to our staff while also being available to attend training online.  We don’t need to worry about traveling and getting exposed to whatever is out there (COVID-19, etc.) so we can stay safe.  People who are tied up and don’t have the bandwidth to get away for 4 days, they can still attend online trainings.  This method has been very effective, and I’ve had great experiences with my online training.  The same goes for Support, everything is online now.  Sometimes I’ve actually held up my phone and FaceTimed with Support to show them my modality, to be walked through the process of resolving an issue, especially when we couldn’t get onsite support do to COVID.  Virtual video meetings have truly helped with this as well.  This trend is going to continue, things are going to go more remote.  The world is going continue to become more online and this will have a positive impact for everyone. 

What do you get out of the Change Healthcare Community website?

It’s give and take.  I learn from others and I try to share what I already know with others who may not know what products we use and how we use them.  The big thing for me is contributing to knowledge sharing as this can have a huge impact.  For example, there was a product we were trying to implement and we didn’t know how to go about it.  After seeing our post on the Community, our Account Executive was able to get us in touch with another customer who uses the product.  Things like this make a huge difference.  The information in the Community is also constantly being added to, including the cheat sheets and training videos.  I can download and share these with my technologists, radiologists, cardiologists, etc.  Because I can share this with the users, I don’t need to create my own videos, I can just send these resources and they follow along.  So contributing to knowledge sharing and accessing the resources on Community are two key things for me.  Besides that, it’s fun to meet other customers!  It’s nice to get to know others, where they’re from, their products, their challenges, how to resolve these and so on.  It’s a learning process and learning from one another is so valuable.

What would you like to see more of in the Community?

I received another badge yesterday, and apparently I’m now a “Platinum Member”!  So acknowledgment like that is great.  For your customers who are engaged, keep encouraging them to stay involved.  I’d love to see other members get even more engaged as it would really make a difference for all of us as customers.  Having a chat function built into Community, as well as having the Community page integrated with the Support Portal (not just the link) would also make it ideal.  So if we could submit tickets directly through an integration between Community and Support, that would be ideal.   We need one less Portal to log in to.  With more customer engagement we’ll get more feedback and input on further ways the Community can be more helpful to others.  You’re already doing a great job of keeping up the documentation and videos.  Just make sure to keep adding more topics that we as customers can continue to use for our ongoing training needs.

Do you have anything else you would like to share?

You know me, if I think of something, I’ll reach out!

For the full interview, please view the attached Customer_Spotlight_Interview_Kumar_Kedre_GIRMC.pdf

Thank you so much to Kumar for being the first participant in our ongoing Customer Spotlight Series.  It was insightful and uplifting to hear your experiences, goals and ideas for the future.

Customers Spotlights will take place every few months and we will be featuring our most active Community members.  To get an idea of your Community activity, please scroll down to the bottom of the home page to view the points leaderboard.  You can also view your engagement points and badges by going to your profile picture at the top right, then clicking Profile > My Contributions > My Summary.