Eileen joined the Banner project team in 2015 when the first Ambulatory events kicked off and she helped see Banner through the conversion of two medical groups that included over 2,000 providers, 250+ clinics and 50+ specialties. She was integral in design, workflows, and adoption and is a trusted partner and advisor of the Banner team.
In 2018, Eileen became one of the Cerner leads for an optimization effort called "Project LightSpeed" that had a goal of rapidly modernizing Banner's platform and functionality across all Cerner solutions. Project LightSpeed followed Cerner's Agile Methodology to deliver new functionality and projects every two weeks with reliable updates and communication sent to end users and teams at Banner. As part of the team, Eileen was the Cerner lead for our specialty medicine group that included Oncology and Behavioral Health.
Under Eileen's guidance, her team delivered over 25 new functionality releases that were all data-driven projects with identified KPIs to measure the value of the changes for key stakeholders and end users. These projects ranged from creating new specialty-specific autotext to improve documentation and developing an operational dashboard for clinics to monitor KPIs and metrics, to adding new Behavioral Health positions aligned to Model and optimizing Workflow MPages to add new functionality for Oncology. Other examples include using data to monitor adoption of new Behavioral Health Admit PowerPlans and following up with providers to ensure the new order sets are leveraged to reduce variability in the admit process. Additionally, Eileen helped her team release BeH Group Therapy Documentation which streamlined processes for the care team and led to an overall reduction in clicks to complete documentation.
Eileen has helped implement and optimize across so many specialties, venues, roles, and solutions at Banner and has helped facilitate increases in communication between Banner IT, Informatics and stakeholder groups. She has shown that a Cerner team member can become a trusted partner and viewed as a member of a client team rather than a vendor by her willingness to jump in and help in any way she can. Eileen is inspirational to our whole team with her positive outlook, her commitment to deliver results for Banner, and her ability to connect with Cerner and Banner team members. Eileen deserves to be recognized for all her contributions as an exemplary Cerner associate and as someone who always goes the extra step to deliver beyond client expectations.
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Eileen has gone above and beyond on many separate occasions since I've worked with her. I first met Eileen when I joined the Banner project as an adoption coach project manager. Any time I or any of my coaches had any questions, she did not hesitate to go the extra mile and explain exactly the how and why of the workflow. With someone with a non-clinical background, this was extremely beneficial because sometimes it was hard for us to connect the dots. This also helps my team convey the workflow to the clinicians and be able to answer their question of why.
I had the pleasure of working with Eileen for almost three years in which she showed agility in working from one wave to another (a grouping of clinics going live). In turn, we took 16 waves live, consisting of over 250 clinics and 2,000 providers. This is a feat in and of itself. She was able to communicate effectively with various stakeholders, whether that be internally or on the client side and make it feel like it's an easy-going conversation that comes naturally in a sometimes hectic situation. One situation that stands out to me specifically is at the beginning of 2018 when we were part of a team conducting an assessment at the University of Arizona Cancer Center - Banner Health. Frustrations were high, and she led the group delegating and assigning tasks, foreseeing barriers and potential opportunities to simplify workflows. After a month of assessing and end-user support/optimization, we worked with client leadership to implement changes in a positive direction. Multiple providers approached the group and thanked us for our work; Eileen constantly deflected and praised the team on the success.
It was truly a pleasure to work with her and this was the same sentiment Cerner and client representatives felt. Thank you, Eileen, for your wisdom, passion and work ethic!