By Eric Andrew Kristof, RN | March 2026
I’ve stood on both sides of the screen.
I’ve been the nurse at the bedside, exhausted at the end of a shift, clicking through seventeen screens in an EHR just to document one straightforward intervention. I’ve muttered under my breath at the mandatory fields, the pop-up alerts, the workflows that seem designed by someone who has never once held a patient’s hand while waiting for lab results.
And I’ve been the IT technician in the server room — or more recently, to support the Epic Go Live cutover— seeing the healthcare teams navigate the new operating systems and software and thinking: I know exactly why that’s frustrating, and I think I know how to fix it.
That dual perspective is rare. It helps to have both medical skills, technical skills, and a high EQ as much as a high IQ.
The Workaround Problem
Here’s something every experienced nurse knows and almost no IT department wants to hear: clinical staff are brilliant at workarounds.
Give a nurse a clunky documentation system and within two weeks, he or she has developed a personal workflow that bypasses the three most annoying steps, uses a sticky note on the monitor to remember the shortcut keys, and has quietly trained every new orientee to do it the same way. They’ll stick a USB mouse jiggler into their workstation to keep the screen active and unknowingly (maybe knowingly) violate company policies.
From the nurse’s perspective, this is survival. From the IT perspective, it’s a data integrity and security nightmare — and often a compliance issue nobody has officially noticed yet.
The gap between those two perspectives is where patient safety lives. And that gap exists, in large part, because the people who design and implement clinical technology often don’t have deep firsthand experience with clinical workflow. They know the software. They may not know what a nurse’s Tuesday at 2 PM actually feels like.
What The Preparation for Go Live Taught Me
Last year I supported the Epic Go Live initiative at CHI St. Vincent in Hot Springs, Arkansas. My role was technical — workstation audits, printer configurations, network checks, making sure the hardware was ready for the cutover. Hundreds of Windows 10 to Windows 11 upgrades and hardware change outs.
But what I experienced during the process was something no technical checklist could have prepared me for.
Go Live preparation can be messy, stressful and exhausting. It is also one of the most revealing windows into how technology, clinical care, and change intersect in practice.
AI Is Coming. Is Healthcare Ready?
I’m completing my CompTIA AI Essentials certification this week, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what artificial intelligence means for the clinical environment.
The promise of AI is enormous. AI-assisted diagnostics, predictive deterioration algorithms, automated documentation that listens to a patient encounter and populates the chart — these are not science fiction. They are either already deployed in leading health systems or in active development.
But I keep coming back to the workaround problem.
If we couldn’t get nurses to use the allergy documentation field correctly because it was buried three clicks deep, what makes us think they’ll trust an AI-generated clinical summary sitting in a chart they’re already skeptical of? If physicians have learned to click through drug interaction alerts because ninety percent of them are irrelevant to their specific patient, what happens when the one alert that actually matters looks exactly like the ninety they’ve trained themselves to ignore? System Alert Fatigue is real and has consequences. Everything is beeping. WNL often stands for “We Never Looked.”
The technology is not the hard part. The hard part is the human being at the bedside, under pressure, making decisions in real time. Any Healthcare IT professional — any AI developer working in the clinical space — who doesn’t deeply understand the human beings who use the systems we envision, build and maintain is building on a foundation of sand.
Why I’m Writing This Blog
I’m in a job search right now, targeting Healthcare IT roles that leverage both sides of my background. And I’ll be honest: writing that sentence still feels a little strange to me, because for years I kept my clinical and technical identities somewhat separate, as if employers might find the combination confusing rather than valuable.
I’ve changed my mind about that.
The healthcare system is in the middle of a technology transformation that is going to reshape how care is delivered, documented, and measured. That transformation will succeed or fail based on whether the people implementing it understand what clinical work actually looks and feels like — not in a workflow diagram, but in a real unit, with real patients, at the end of a real shift.
I understand that. It’s not theoretical for me. And I think that understanding is worth something.
So this blog is where I’m going to think out loud about it. About Healthcare IT; the tech industry; how AI will change everything everywhere . About nursing informatics. About AI in clinical settings and what it will mean for the people who actually use it. About the gap between the boardroom and the bedside, and what it takes to bridge it. About the politics of IT. And specifically in Health Information Management Systems and the people who work with them.
I hope you’ll find it useful. I hope it sparks conversation. And if you’re a recruiter or a hiring manager who found your way here — Welcome! There’s a resume on this site if you’d like to take a look.
Eric Andrew Kristof is a Registered Nurse and Healthcare IT professional based in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas. He holds CompTIA A+ and CompTIA AI Essentials certifications, is a Microsoft Certified Professional, and is a member of HIMSS. He is currently seeking Healthcare IT roles in clinical informatics, EHR implementation, and end user services.
Reach him at eric.andrew.kristof@gmail.com or connect on LinkedIn.
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