1) Make “Strong Opinions Weakly Held” Your Mantra

Brittany Partridge
Jul 24, 2017 · 2 min read

The first thing one must come to accept when working in HealthIT is: Change is constant. If you are someone who struggles with and resists change then this isn’t the field for you. The ability to be flexible, to constantly re-imagine and re-engineer projects and processes is a career necessity when breaking into Health Tech.

I first learned this lesson the hard way. A project I had been working on for months was completely scraped and sent back to the drawing board. At the beginning I was heartbroken, thinking I must have done something wrong, when in reality this was just a lesson that needed to be filed and added to my repertoire.

The health world is constantly changing. With regulations relentlessly being revised and modified. New government mandates handed out right and left. Best Practices for all fields of medicine, reviewed and updated at a rapid speed. There is no room to be stagnant, in order to come out ahead or at least keep up with the ceaselessly morphing requirements, we must adapt and evolve.

“Strong Opinions Weakly Held”, allows you to catch on to an idea, believe in it and lead a team. If you don’t have a conviction about the design you are creating or project you are implementing, no one will follow. While your opinions must be strong to lead the charge, they must be weakly held. This gives the ability to cast the project aside at a moments notice, without any regret, to take on and meet the next challenge. Then, to have strong opinions about new regulation and best practice design.

Strong opinions strongly held, leads to slow change, hurt feelings and resentment in the workplace. Weak opinions strongly held, leads to waffling and failure to move forward. Seizing constant change and running with it? That is the way to survive in HealthIT!

** Originally Published on my Blog http://brittanypartridge.com/blog/ as part of the Series: Top 10 Things I Have Learned From Working in HealthIT

Brittany Partridge

Clinical Informatics Specialist, Data nerd,CDS. Crossfit and Whiskey enthusiast. Happiest on, in or by the water. #HIMSS #AMIA-PPC #Healthitchicks

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