A career spent at the hospital counter and behind it

In the spring of 1999, a few months after I joined Yuejiang General Hospital in Chengdu as a network engineer, we switched its outpatient department to a new hospital information system. The software worked. The printers in the outpatient pharmacy did not keep up, and by ten o'clock on the first morning about three hundred patients were queuing for their medicines with paper slips the new system could not read. I spent that day carrying prescriptions between floors. It gave me the measure I still use: a system in healthcare is judged where a patient is waiting, not in the meeting where it is declared live.

I grew up in Leshan, where my mother was a pharmacist at the county hospital, and studied biomedical engineering at Wenshui Institute of Engineering, graduating in 1998. Yuejiang, then a 2,700-bed public teaching hospital, hired me into a four-person information centre. By 2001 I was leading its hospital information system project, and I had learnt that the hardest parts of a hospital system are the joins between departments that do not report to one another: pharmacy and finance, laboratory and wards, the insurance desk and everyone else.

In 2003 I joined Qiaoyun Health Software, a Shenzhen hospital-software company, to implement systems in other people's hospitals. Over seven years I led implementations in 46 hospitals across Sichuan, Chongqing and Guizhou, most of them county and city hospitals with small technical teams and older equipment. After the Wenchuan earthquake in May 2008, my team spent eleven weeks restoring systems at eleven hospitals in affected counties, several of them working from temporary buildings. Those weeks taught me how much a hospital depends on records it rarely thinks about, and how little of that dependence appears in a project plan.

Yuejiang asked me back in 2010 as director of its information department. For five years I led 58 people through the replacement of separate departmental systems with an electronic medical record across 62 wards and an integration platform connecting 37 systems. We cut the median wait at the outpatient pharmacy from 24 minutes to nine, which mattered more to me than any grading, although the hospital was assessed at level four of the health ministry's electronic medical record grading in 2014. I also sat across the table from vendors and distributors who wanted our data, and learnt to ask what each request was for.

In 2015 I moved to Shanghai to run IT for the China business of Vestrell Pharma, a fictional European medicines group. I wanted to see the industry from the manufacturer's side and to work to a multinational's standards of control. The Cybersecurity Law took effect in 2017 while I was there, and I led the move of our China customer-relationship and employee data from the group's regional data centre in Singapore to hosting inside China. I also rebuilt our order-to-cash process for the two-invoice rules that reshaped hospital drug procurement from 2017 and pushed manufacturers towards fewer, larger distributors. I completed a part-time MBA at Linyuan School of Management in 2018.

Shuheng recruited me in 2019 to build the technology for its hospital supply services, and I came home to Chengdu. When our CIO retired in 2021 I succeeded him. I now lead 386 IT colleagues, with about 140 contractors, across Chengdu, Chongqing, Guiyang, Kunming and our nine logistics centres. I report to our president and attend the board's Strategy Committee and Audit Committee whenever technology, controls or data are on the agenda.

My working method is simple to describe and slow to practise. Before approving a system, I ask who will be standing at the counter, the warehouse dock or the pharmacy window when it fails, and what they will do then. Before approving a data flow, I ask what the recipient will decide with the data, and whether it could decide the same thing with less. I ask my managers to report the systems they want to retire as readily as the ones they want to build, and I have learnt to give a business head a plain no in writing, with the reason, rather than an indefinite maybe.

Colleagues in the trade would probably associate me with three positions. I think a distributor should verify manufacturers' traceability data before passing it to hospitals, even when that slows the dock. I think procurement reform should narrow an IT estate rather than thin it evenly. And I think hospitals' patient data should stay in hospitals unless there is a specific, lawful reason for a copy to leave. Each position has cost us revenue or speed at some point, and I have tried to tell the board so plainly each time.

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