People of PointClickCare – Sarah Provan

Did you know that PointClickCare’s Sarah Provan grew up in a town in western New York that is so small it doesn’t even have a stoplight? As PointClickCare continues to grow, we’ve acquired some incredible organizations full of equally wonderful colleagues we’re eager to get to know more about. Sarah is one of those people and today we’re going to get to know her.

Rapid Fire 🔥 

What was your dream job as a kid? Veterinarian

Most used Emoji? Most used: ♥ Tied for second: 😆🎉🤦‍

Favorite Colour? My girls believe it’s purple, but I’ve never been sure why. I lean towards blue or green

Favorite Sport? Volleyball

Winter or summer? BOTH! I live in the mountains and love being outside in all seasons

Staying Active

Outside of work, Sarah is extremely active and loves to ski (both Nordic and Alpine), snowshoe, hike, mountain bike, and take long walks while her kids are at their various sports practices. “I have a 6-year-old rescue mutt (who is more fun than he appears while he is sleeping on camera during all my conference calls) and I also like to garden during Park City’s growing season, which is approximately eight weeks in July and August.”

Journey to Healthcare Tech

Like many others, Sarah found her way to PointClickCare though the Collective Medical acquisition.

Although she is our Sr Director of Operations and Delivery, Sarah didn’t start out thinking that she would have a career in Professional Services. In fact, she has a degree in Biomedical engineering. “I was fairly sure that I was going to spend my career designing better knee braces. It wasn’t until my last year of college where I spent a good chunk of time coding that I figured out that I could get a job in software without a PhD and that software is actually pretty neat.”

Sarah then started her career at Epic where she got to see firsthand the power that technology can have on how care is delivered. “I will never forget my first night shift on the floor of a hospital where I was helping the clinicians get comfortable with their new system. Watching them recognize the ways that a system could help them improve patient care opened my eyes to a whole new world of career opportunities.”

While Sarah has had many roles since then, she has always chosen roles where she felt that she could make a difference. “This remains true today as my group makes care provider’s lives better by getting better technology in their hands so they can do the work of helping patients.” She also says that having a strong sense of the mission of the organization helps keep her on track. “Tying back to this big picture makes it easier to find resilience when the work gets hard, and in healthcare it does get hard from time to time.”

Transitioning to PointClickCare

For Sarah, the transition to PointClickCare was smoothed by the fact that the two organizations aligned so well on their missions to help others. “It has been a wonderful experience getting to know the company and the people. I love how well the company missions aligns with what attracted me to Collective Medical in the first place and how well we all work together to help make things a little less painful for those providing care to North America’s most vulnerable patients.”

She also mentions that the people she works with are another reason that she loves working at PointClickCare. “I really enjoy the people I get to work with and the resources we have available to help us grow as individuals and teams and being a part of individual and team growth is important to me. It’s been inspiring to witness our teams stare down some big challenges and find a way forward.”

On Leadership

For Sarah, leadership is more than just training and coaching; it’s communication. She mentions that some of the most important characteristics for a leader to possess are “Big ears and small mouths. I realize that sounds funny when combined that way, but I strongly believe that those who listen deeply and speak carefully make the best leaders.”

We also asked Sarah, when it comes to management styles, if there was a particular approach or phrase she would use to describe how she works with her team. She told us, that when it comes to management styles, there isn’t always one singular approach. “Folks who work with me know that I use a LOT of phrases and analogies that I’ve picked up over the years, so it was surprisingly hard to pick just one! That said, I think most of what I do ties back to this belief that every process is perfectly designed to get the results it is getting.”

She mentions that this is loosely attributed to Edward Deming, “this phrase is popular with quality improvement groups, and clicked for me after hearing it for the first time.” Sarah says she uses this concept to celebrate with her teams when things go right, and to ground them when things aren’t going right. “If we don’t like the result, we need to go back and redesign or change the process. Finger pointing and blaming gets us nowhere. Digging in and exploring what got us to the result and deliberately iterating on the process is the key to moving forward. We cannot control many of the things we run into, but we do control our processes. Focusing on the processes we control enables us to proactively face the challenges in our work and find paths forward.”

Thanks for sharing, Sarah!