Cancer center's IT pros keep up with doctors' needs

The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center employs more than 700 professionals in its IT department. They support roughly 16,000 employees, more than 20,000 desktops and the more than 79,000 cancer patients the center will treat this year. Unlike many healthcare organizations, where the IT department supports only the clinical side of the business, the IT department at M.D. Anderson supports all the cancer center's business processes and functions, from treating patients to research to granting academic degrees.

The IT department also does much of its own application development, especially for clinical software and systems. It developed its own electronic medical record (EMR) system, for example, that combines patient data from the treatment and research sides of the organization. The IT department implemented a service-oriented architecture (SOA), which, during any given month, handles 125 million service calls for the EMR system alone.

Such a large, complex organization with such a critical mission demands customer-focused, team-oriented IT professionals who can keep up with the organization's ever-changing needs, says Dr. Lynn Vogel, M.D. Anderson's vice president and CIO. M.D. Anderson is one of the premier cancer treatment and research facilities in the U.S.

"Working in a place like M.D. Anderson is like working in quicksand; things are constantly shifting under your feet, and you have to be fairly fast to keep up with that," he says.

To determine whether candidates for positions in his IT department possess the mettle to survive and thrive at M.D. Anderson, Vogel focuses on their technical expertise and accomplishments during job interviews. In this Hiring Manager interview, he discusses what it takes for IT staff to succeed in his organization, how he makes hiring decisions and the hiring mistake he just can't seem to shake.

What are some of the biggest challenges you face in IT, and how do they impact your staffing decisions?

M.D. Anderson Cancer Center is generally acknowledged to be one of the best cancer treatment and research organizations. When I came on board several years ago, the expectation was that the information technology organization should also be the best. So we started a three-year process of determining if we have the right people doing the right jobs in the right place in the organization. We currently support over 20,000 desktops, and our customers are very demanding: They want bandwidth, reliability, and they want to make sure everything works all the time. It is a 7/24 operation, and our faculty really pushed the envelope with their expectations for everything from Internet access to the ability to transfer gigabyte files to their colleagues around the world. [M.D. Anderson operates an affiliate facility in Spain.]

Consequently, when it comes to staffing, we really have to go for top-notch people who have deep experience. Given what we're doing technologically with software development, our services architecture and the complexity of our network organization, we don't compete for people who have just graduated from college. We compete for people who have been in the marketplace for five to six years and have been in a high transaction volume, enterprisewide environment. Those people are fairly hard to find. It is a matter of matching the leadership capabilities of the staff with their technical abilities. I have 13 direct reports, each of whom is absolutely top-notch in their field, whether it is financial systems, clinical systems, security, project management, network services or managing the data center. We push the envelope in each of these areas, which means that we have to hire people who have deep technical expertise and know how to operate in a large, complex organization.