Welcome to Defender Profiles. Here you’ll learn about one of our amazing defenders of childhood – everything from what they do for CHOC to what they do for fun – and gain insight into a different department in our health system.
After spending about 10 years as a bedside nurse at CHOC at Mission Hospital, Kathleen Demarjian learned in winter 2018 about an upcoming vacancy for her dream job. An employee’s upcoming retirement would allow Kathleen to blend her love of pediatric nursing and informatics by serving as a clinical informaticist at CHOC Mission. Kathleen loves problem-solving and advocating for the clinical needs of CHOC employees and physicians to best support the patients and families we serve at CHOC.
How long have you worked at CHOC?
I just celebrated my 15th anniversary last October. I started working part-time as a nurse at CHOC Mission in 2008 when I took on a second job as my daughters started going to college. My background is in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) and pediatrics unit. I came on full-time to join the information services department (ISD) when the clinical informaticist position opened in 2019. I was thrilled to be able to put my clinical informatics hospital experience together with my pediatric nursing experience in this role.
Why did you decide to go into nursing?
I read a lot of Clara Barton and Sue Barton books – books about nurses – when I was a little kid and I wanted to be a nurse from when I was probably 8 years old. I think reading these books had an influence on me wanting to become a nurse.
Can you describe your current role?
I am a clinical informaticist with a focus on supporting CHOC Mission. I work together with our clinical and ISD employees to translate the needs of both nurses and physicians for our electronic medical records (EMR). I make sure that ISD understands what clinicians need and how they process information so that they can create a system that is intuitive for clinicians’ daily needs. Collaborating with these teams allows us to come up with a solution that can be built by ISD and effectively used by clinicians. This is still a fairly new specialty, as when I started at CHOC part-time as a nurse, we were using only paper documentation. I round about twice a week and lead hands-on training and teaching of the EMR system to keep up to date with the employees who are using it for patient care.
Since I am at CHOC Mission, my role also involves collaborating with Providence Mission Hospital, since we are located within the hospital on the fifth floor, to ensure we are aware of any changes coming to our EMR system and to make suggestions for changes to the system for improvement.
How would someone become a clinical informaticist?
You would need to have at least a few years of clinical experience. There are also master’s programs and certification programs for informatics. You need experience in both to get into this role.
What do you love about your current role?
The problem-solving, the investigation and the ability to really make a difference for nurses and doctors by understanding and interpreting the clinical workflow and serving as a translator for clinicians to the ISD analysts. And vice versa, as I take my knowledge of software functionality and translate that into language and activities that make sense for clinicians. I love it when I take a concept that initially is confusing to a nurse or analyst, and I am able to explain it in a way that makes sense to them.
What do you love about working at CHOC?
I really appreciate the culture here, where we assume good intentions from everyone. It makes it easier to try new ideas and ways of thinking without being worried about getting scolded for not being successful. We reevaluate and try again, all as a team, without huge egos involved.
How has CHOC changed and progressed in your time here?
I feel like CHOC Mission is more integrated into the larger CHOC health system. Specifically in my clinical informaticist role, I see a greater collaboration and more awareness between CHOC Orange and CHOC Mission that has resulted in faster resolution of specific issues at CHOC Mission. CHOC ISD has worked very hard to put a process in place to ensure that network issues at CHOC Mission are dealt with quickly. That is very gratifying.
What do you wish employees knew about the ISD clinical informatics department?
We aren’t field services. I don’t carry spare keyboards around. However, I can help you put a ticket in and get it to the right team for support. I love it when a charting difficulty is brought to me, and I work with the clinician to find the best and easiest way to complete their documentation. Since the focus of clinical informatics is the use of technology and data to improve healthcare safety and quality, I am constantly using the nursing process (assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation and evaluation) as a clinical informaticist. In addition to working with clinicians at the bedside, I also team up with analysts, project managers and leadership at both CHOC and Providence Mission Hospital to improve the patient records management systems, while being an advocate for the child who is at the heart of that electronic medical record.
What do you wish employees knew about CHOC at Mission?
We have a remarkably close culture since we are a small team. There is a lot of pride amongst employees who work at CHOC Mission.
Do you have any favorite moments or stories about working at CHOC that you can share?
Working Christmas Eve or Christmas Day can be hard on nurses when they miss being with their own families. So, I made it my goal to make those days more fun by bringing in word search puzzles, having hourly drawings and playing hours-long games of Bingo – where one number was drawn every half-hour in between patient care. And everyone got a prize of course! People still remind me of those times during the Christmas season.
What do you think makes someone a great Defender of Childhood?
We always remember the baby, the child and the family – that is at the heart of the reason we work at CHOC.
What are your hobbies and interests outside of work?
I love to travel! I really enjoy the planning, the details and the preparation for a trip. My motto is to be prepared to be flexible. Right now, I am planning a summer trip to New York City, Scotland, Ireland and Iceland for six of us. So far, we are attending an outdoor Celtic music concert in Edinburgh and seeing Riverdance in Dublin.
I also love spending time with my daughters and their dogs. One has two German shepherds and the other has two black pugs.
What is one thing on your bucket list?
Only one thing? My bucket list is dynamic and evolving. I would love to see the Northern Lights, hike the full length of the French Camino and bike down Haleakalā on Maui. My list is long and always being added to.
