Our Pandemic Heroes

Dr. Jan Millermaier `72: Connecting Medicine and Technology to Support Medical Personnel

Editor’s note: Thanks to Shelley Greenwood `73 for interviewing Dr. Jan Millermaier `73 to share her story.

Dr. Jan Millermaier `72: Connecting Medicine and Technology to Support Medical Personnel As the pandemic sweeps across the world, news stories continue to feature frontline healthcare workers assuming grueling hours working to save critically ill COVID patients. Behind doctors, nurses, and other specialists is an intricate network of technology that supports efficient and effective delivery of patient care. One such system of hardware and software has been developed and refined by experts like Dr. Jan Millermaier `72. As a physician with more than 37 years in family practice, as well as urgent care and emergency medicine, Jan also became involved in physician education for the electronic medical record system, Epic. She has developed curricula and trained providers, as well as guided the software build to meet health system specifications. Upon moving to Grand Rapids in 2015, Jan became Associate Chief Medical Informatics Officer for Spectrum Health, a large health system in west Michigan.

Individuals in clinical informatics serve as a bridge between information technology and medicine. In her role, Jan facilitates the connection between medical professionals and technology developers to develop and implement technology systems. As the pandemic hit Detroit, Spectrum (in western Michigan) anticipated their medical network would soon be similarly impacted. Preparations for the surge meant Jan would no longer see patients one day a week and would devote long hours from March to May implementing technology system changes and related training to support Spectrum’s frontline medical personnel in treating patients.

Jan explained that as they reconfigured their Epic system to accommodate the changes brought by COVID, they “built out an entire virtual hospital in one of the non-hospital buildings on our campus, enabling the use of the electronic record in those spaces.” Within the system they also had to redesignate actual hospital floors as COVID only and expand the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) capabilities.

Not only did the use of hospital spaces change, but practitioner roles were also modified. As 110 anesthesiologists were trained to function as ICU doctors and more than 100 ambulatory primary care doctors served as hospitalists, Jan and her team needed to do work within Epic to provide the medical staff with the software tools and associated training to perform in these new roles.

As with many medical systems, Spectrum had some providers doing virtual visits but needed to greatly expand that capability. Within two weeks 1,000 ambulatory providers were trained on conducting virtual patient visits and the Epic build was completed to enable that ability. A project of that size and scope would normally have taken about three months to build and several additional months for provider and staff education. Aside from these significant operational modifications, Jan explained other changes also needed to be implemented. For example, as COVID tests and testing criteria changed, the software system needed to reflect those changes to configure orders. Additionally, screening tools for visitors had to be built to keep COVID from being brought into the hospitals.

While the unrelenting and rapid-fire pace of change and the hours of labor needed to accommodate that work while maintaining the high standards expected by the provider community has been a challenge. Jan observed that she had a great time working with analysts 20 to 40 years younger. “It was energizing!” she exclaimed. Jan recalled that at Wayland she excelled in French and has always loved languages. Her work now, she reflected, “is also an exercise in translation between computer science and the practice of medicine.” She noted a sense of satisfaction in the significant effort to make the software easier and more efficient to help providers care for their patients.