by Tara Swords
February 2017
As vice president and CIO of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, Dee Emon spends her days immersed in the world of IT. But underlying all the talk of integrations and workflows and processes and data is the real reason she does her job: the patients.
Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center
Location: Winston-Salem, North Carolina
Industry: Healthcare
Employees: 14,000
Revenue: US$2.4 billion
Vice President and CIO
Length of tenure: Three years
Education: MS in business and management, Cardinal Stritch University; BS in nursing, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh; Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Certification, Villanova University
Personal quote/mantra: “The path to becoming more effective resides in constantly challenging ourselves to simplify.”
For Emon, the connection between IT and patient care isn’t abstract; she’s a former nurse. After beginning her career directly caring for patients, she moved up the ranks to become chief nurse at a previous employer. But her love for technology made her the go-to person for IT questions, too.
Before selecting Oracle HCM Cloud, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center Vice President and CIO Dee Emon and team spent a lot of time addressing the key question: was the cloud really the way to go?
Every year Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center serves nearly 400,000 patients throughout three hospitals and 286 clinics.
Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center’s Chad A. Eckes, Executive Vice President of Corporate Services and CFO, with Vice President and CIO Dee Emon
“I’m a systems thinker, so every time technology issues would come up, I became the person people would ask,” Emon says. “So by default, I’ve always been the business partner to IT in every organization I’ve worked at.” This background makes Emon the ideal person to guide a healthcare organization through such a big transition as the Oracle HCM Cloud implementation, because she’s able to help people stay focused on the true value of the project. In this case, she says, the true value is empowering people to stop wasting time on inefficient HR process and direct their time toward patients. “In our department, we continually talk about what we’re doing and how it impacts patient care,” Emon says. “What keeps me getting up and coming to work every day is trying to make the care better for patients, and this solution is going to allow people to focus on things that will actually move healthcare forward.”
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Photography by Shutterstock
