Karen Bolen, director of inpatient clinical applications in the Information Services (IS) department at ECU Health, has built her career by combining her background as a nurse with health care technology. Bolen began her career working as a bedside and charge nurse in emergency departments across West Virginia and Kentucky. She also managed an emergency department before moving into information technology.
Her transition to health care IT started in the early 2000s when she was selected to beta test an electronic health record (EHR) platform for the emergency department. The experience prompted her to shift from direct patient care to EHR development. “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,” Bolen said. “I quickly realized this is where I wanted to be.”
Bolen used her nursing education and years of ED experience to help build an effective EHR system tailored for clinicians’ needs. “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.”
She noted that working on electronic health records allowed her to support both patients and medical staff on a broader scale: “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,” Bolen 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.”
Bolen highlighted that while her nursing background helped develop clinical platforms, additional training was necessary: “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.
In 2017 Bolen joined ECU Health where she found alignment with her team’s mission supporting hospital technologies such as Epic EHR integration with fetal monitoring systems and mobile documentation tools. “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.”
Her responsibilities include supporting multiple departments such as emergency medicine (ED), operating rooms (OR), anesthesia services, pharmacy operations and ambulatory surgery units: “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.”
Bolen encourages others interested in health care or technology roles: “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 added: “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.”
