Cancer Institute of New Jersey, Radiation Oncology 2019-Present

By Alyssa Siegel

I can compare my early days working with Sharda to a lyric from a favorite Alanis Morrisette song “You were the best platform from which to jump beyond myself”. Here I was, starting my job as a Program Administrator in Radiation Oncology, with no experience in healthcare and minimal formal experience in management. Under normal circumstances, I would have suffered from a serious case of imposter syndrome. But Sharda didn’t give me any time to do that. Within the first few months of starting this position, Sharda sent me to the Society of Radiation Oncology Administrators (SROA) conference in Chicago, where I attended many sessions and got a jump start in the Radiation Oncology field. While there, Sharda would say things like “start thinking about what your presentation will be next year”. I suddenly found myself on calls with high-level hospital administrators discussing new payment models and quality programs. It was all quite surreal. 

I would like to think that Sharda’s faith in me was not misplaced. I learned a tremendous amount in a short period of time, as if I was catching up with all the aspects of my career that I had not experienced to this point. I interviewed job candidates and hired staff, created slide decks and presentations, led weekly meetings, etc. And, lo and behold, at the 2021 SROA annual meeting, I was up there with Sharda presenting our talk “Using Office 365 to Improve Efficiency”. 


From slide deck when presenting with Sharda

Together with Sharda, we embarked on several projects developing applications for our department. Unlike how I worked in my career up until this point, Sharda had her eye on making this a team effort. This was not just about developing cool applications, but rather the ability to implement and utilize them in a sustainable and effective way. This meant that I could no longer be a “lone wolf” developer, but rather work closely with team members, paying careful attention to workflow so that these applications could be seamlessly integrated into our department. Our work was now a team effort. We made sure to include team members playing a variety of roles so that we could break down the barriers enabling siloed thinking counterproductive to team efforts. We had an IT staff member helping us with our environmental and back-end database needs, members of our Admin team helping make suggestions so that the way applications worked aligned nicely with their job responsibilities and we had Sharda in a leadership role, making sure reports available from our applications aligned with how and what leadership would want learn and see visually.


The first application I developed with our Radonc team is called Qualtrac™. Qualtrac is an integrated Quality Monitoring platform that interfaces with data from Electronic Health Records. Data is run through algorithms to provide reporting on a series of quality metrics, providing great insight into our clinic and providers’ performance.  

 
On the road to potentially commercialize Qualtrac ™, Sharda and I participated in I-Corps™, an immersive, seven-week entrepreneurial training program funded by the National Science Foundation. Subsequently, we received a grant from the New Jersey Health Foundation Venture Capital Group to continue development of Qualtrac. 


Our second large-scale project is called OneLook™. OneLook is a relational person-centric database that incorporates and integrates data from a series of areas (finance, HR, academic activity, etc.) providing near instant views of data and reports that are meaningful at a department level. 


Please read the next chapter of my blog: Dream Team

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