There and back Again – A Healthcare IT Journey

AEHIA member Heather Sulkers’ life journey has taken her from Australia to Canada, from nursing to clinical informatics, from Fortune 500 companies to Canada’s largest mental health teaching hospital – and in February, to a capstone in her career when she was named one of the most influential women in health IT by Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). This is her second prestigious award in two years; in late 2017, she received a Top 10 Canadian Women Leaders in Digital Health title from Digital Health Canada.

Senior director of the enterprise project management office and clinical informatics at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto, Sulkers said a willingness to explore opportunities when they presented themselves allowed her to develop the leadership skills that, among other accomplishments, helped CAMH earn a HIMSS Enterprise Davies Award in 2018 and HIMSS EMRAM Stage 7 in 2017. A collaborator at heart, she seeks out projects the bring people together to find solutions.

“Whether it is implementing a new solution to improve workflow or finding resources to staff up a project or helping people to see their own project management certification in their career, what I enjoy most is working with people and working with stakeholders collaboratively to solve problems,” Sulkers said.

Collaboration is key for building trust, clinician buy-in and adoption, she added.

“Change is never easy for clinicians,” Sulkers observed. “It is important to remember to look at things through the eyes of the stakeholders you are working with, even if you can’t implement a solution that is going to 100 percent perfect.”

Sulkers joined CAMH in late 2015 as a senior portfolio manager and became the director of clinical informatics in 2017. She assumed her present role, where she oversees all informatics initiatives and projects at CAMH, in late 2018. Her previous positions include manager of human capital at Deloitte Canada and implementation lead at Fujitsu Canada. She started her career in health informatics through IBM after a stint as a nurse in Australia.

CAMH consists of more than 3,200 staff, 400 physicians, 1,250 researchers and provides care to over 35,500 patients annually. Sulkers credits CAMH’s collaborative culture and a clearly defined long-term vision for the use of electronic health records and data for their successes. “That really is about understanding who our patients are and using the data we capture to inform and improve patient care and outcomes,” she said.

She is optimistic about the opportunities that informatics offers women. However, she still sees room for improvement and feels that having more women as well as an overall diverse workforce is advantageous. “With diversity you bring richness to any team and therefore bring greater success because you are representing the opinions of multiple different groups and types of stakeholders as opposed to one gender or one race or one cultural population.”

Sulkers was one of five women to be named 2019 HIMSS Most Influential Women in Health IT. The awards were presented at the HIMSS19 Awards gala on Feb. 13 in Orlando, Fla.

3.13.19 By Candace Stuart, Director, Communications