Alumna Spotlight

Emily Barey

Emily Barey is a nurse. But Emily Barey does not administer medications, perform assessments, change linens, or counsel patients. She does not teach at a school of nursing or conduct clinical research.

Emily Barey works in informatics, a branch of health care little known to most nurses and nursing students. In her role on the clinical informatics team at Epic Systems, Emily ensures that the computer systems designed and implemented by her company best serve the interests of nurses and patients; as she says, "I try to keep my hands in or ears open to almost everything 'nursing' at Epic."

Epic Systems' website describes the company as "an innovative developer of integrated inpatient, ambulatory, and payor systems." According to Emily, Epic produces software for use in the entire spectrum of the patient experience in the hospital, "from registration and scheduling, through the clinical care process, all the way through billing and claims."

Emily spends the majority of her time working onsite with customers and prospective customers, explicating the benefits of Epic's software and advising on its use. She spends much time training nurses and states that her work allows her a "really nice balance" between quality assurance, technical services, sales, and implementation, as well as between the corporate and clinical realms.

"Other positions I looked at in policy and management arenas were not close enough to the bedside for me," explains Emily. "I was pretty clear that even though I did not want to be at the bedside, I still wanted my nursing practice to impact that space and patient population."

Though her work does not instantly align with traditional understandings of nursing, Emily's background in nursing and her YSN education constantly inform and motivate her daily actions: "Nursing explains why I am good at my job in a different way from my colleagues who don't have a clinical background." Emily cites the "intimate patient work" provided by her YSN clinicals as impacting her work. "If you have given discharge instructions and helped families make hard decisions, it informs you as you move onto a more macro level," she states.

Emily's interest in informatics was first sparked by a course on "Data and Decision Making," co-taught by Donna Diers at the School of Public Health. The central question of the class, how to take raw data and analyze it to inform clinical decisions, alerted her to nurses' crucial role in data collection.

"Until this class," Emily recalls, "I had no idea that what I did as a bedside nurse was the root for this data that I was looking at." All of the information documented by nurses and other health care providers goes into this "great database" which enables administrators and researchers to check demographics, critique care, and even predict readmission rates.

During Diers' course, Emily came to recognize the "amazing" impact that computers have had on this type of analysis. "You can imagine trying to collect that data manually," she muses. "To be able to do that quickly with a few keystrokes was really powerful to me."

Emily's curiosity about informatics was not sated by her studies at YSN; she wanted to learn more about data collection and "to see where that field was going." Encouraged by faculty members including Diers not to limit herself in her job search when she graduated in 2001, Emily looked "beyond hospitals and clinics, even beyond health care." On the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society website, Emily came across an ad for her current job at Epic. She describes the job as a "good match" and her decision to move to Madison, Wisconsin and accept the position as an "easy choice."

Emily would advise new YSN grads to approach their careers with similar flexibility. She counsels current students "not to be afraid to step out of the traditional role of a nurse practitioner or nurse-midwife." Drawing on her own satisfaction with her career as an illustration, she continues, "you can find really meaningful things to do outside the four walls of a health care institution, and we need nurses involved in those things."