After graduation in 2014, I moved to Denver, Colorado and worked as a client implementation specialist for SpinFusion, a medical scheduling software company. My responsibilities were to understand the complex scheduling needs of our customers and translate them into logic I then configured in the software. This was a big step outside my “lane” with a history degree, but the critical thinking and communication skills I honed in that program served me very well. After around 6 months in Denver, Binghamton University in upstate New York offered funding for entry into their MA/PhD program in history, and I decided I had to give my dream of becoming a professor of history a fair shot, so I left and started graduate school. Northern had prepared me well for my graduate studies and I met a very strong group of friends at Binghamton, but I had enjoyed working in the tech field a lot more than I anticipated. I made the decision to leave grad school after my first semester and used Northern’s job search resources to find my next employer, Epic Systems in Madison, Wisconsin. Epic is the largest electronic medical record software company in the country – Epic employs over 10,000 people and over half of the American population has a record in an Epic system. My experience at SpinFusion and the “soft skills” polished at NSU again served me very well as I joined Epic’s quality assurance team in early 2015. I was responsible for trying to break the system so that bugs could be fixed before they were ever seen by the clinicians using Epic while they deliver patient care. In particular, the creative thinking and clear communication skills I learned in my BA were put into use often to break and document bugs. I become a team lead at Epic around 6 months after my hire and moved into people management, ultimately managing up to 12 direct reports. I met my wife at Epic (while we were both on their cardiology application “Cupid”, no less!) and made incredible friends I remain close with nearly a decade later. After about 4 years in quality assurance, I moved internally to their technical services team, where I was assigned to several large healthcare systems across the country as their primary Epic point of contact. I was responsible for creating long term relationships with my customers, understanding their (sometimes very complicated!) individual needs, served as their advocate to Epic’s development team, and served as their technical expert. In this last area, Epic paid for me to take courses in computer science at the University of Wisconsin. My most proud accomplishment at Epic was in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. I was one of two individuals responsible for determining and communicating best practices for healthcare systems across the country to track COVID immunization administration, and to assist those systems in prioritizing vaccinating individuals at high risk for COVID complications. Those were very busy, uncertain days at Epic and at health systems, and I credit opportunities Northern offered me to learn to self-prioritize and work through abstract, not-well-defined problems (such as completing my Honors thesis) with the role I played in that very important effort. In 2021, wanting to be closer to my family in Vermont as they aged, I left Epic after nearly 7 years to work for a Federally Qualified Health System in my home town in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. My work there was as overall project manager as they implemented a new medical record system in their home health and hospice division. I was again responsible for understanding the needs of my employer and working with the software company they were purchasing from to ensure they understood and delivered on our needs. As an FQHC, this employer needed its employees to be very flexible and efficient, so I also served on their information technology team more generally, and oversaw the selection and implementation of a new modern IT ticketing system. The home health and hospice software went live successfully in late 2021, and I determined that I wanted to make the move into full time remote work. In November 2021, I started work for Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, Oregon, working remotely from Vermont. OHSU is a large academic health system and uses Epic as its medical record system. I joined OHSU’s team dedicated to population health. I am responsible for the implementation of a portion of the Epic software that allows OHSU to understand how well it provides care to specific groups of patients. Through this work, we can identify areas where we can keep patients healthier and act on risks earlier. The Epic experience and technical skills I learned at Epic are of course vital in this work, but so much of success in the modern workplace is the ability to understand complicated concepts, to ask questions, to think critically, and to communicate – and all of these are areas where I owe a debt to NSU. Michael Newman (he/him) Senior System Application Analyst Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics OHSU ALUMNI Spotlight Michael Newman with his wife, Paige.
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