Frankfort Regional Ranks #2 In Best Hospital IT Departments

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It was a new project for Healthcare IT News, the Best Places To Work: Hospital IT Departments, designed to recognize the best IT departments demonstrating deep respect for their employees and the work they do. Ranking categories included: day-to-day work, the IT team, management, hospital leadership, workplace culture, training and development and compensation.

And of the 10 best medium-sized hospitals (those with 101 to 350 beds), Frankfort Regional Medical Center of HCA’s Capital Division, located in Frankfort, KY, placed second.

The IT team at Frankfort, led by Craig Willard, is only a group of ten, but they possess a broad range of knowledge with strong technical skills, while also being good thinkers. “We have very strong technical employees in the facility,” Willard says. “But we can also be very creative, which makes us a lot better.”

He calls his department “forward thinking, but fun”, a balance that enables his team to thrive in a hectic and constantly evolving workplace.

To lighten stress, the group often plays practical jokes on each other. Things like flipping each other’s monitor screens upside down and leaving a colleague with the task of trying to right it.

Yet in between the jokes the team still manages to maintain the integrity of their department by getting a huge amount of work done in a timely manner.

When their MEDITECH system went live in October, it was due in large part to over two years of work of determining the right technology. Of course IT folk have the capacity to handle the most mundane technical complications in areas that most others are completely inept, but when it comes to the extremely technical, Willard’s team really knuckles down and works endlessly until the problem has been resolved.

Part of that comes from Willard’s encouragement for his staff to be team oriented and to pursue further education in their skill area by taking advantage of the $6,000 the hospital pays toward class tuition, up to $24,000 in total.

Though most of his team is self-taught, “I’m a firm believer in education. It’s opened up doors for me as it will for my staff.”

Three of his employees are now pursuing bachelor’s degrees in business administration, computer science/information security and general education.

But Willard says he never hires based on an impressive resume; rather he looks for the right personality.

“When you’re in a customer-focused environment, you can educate someone, but you can’t teach someone to be a nice person, or (to be) someone who goes above and beyond,” Willard says.
Congratulations Craig. You and your team are true assets to Frankfort Medical and to HCA.