Stay far away from Frederick Health (Formerly FMH)
Pros
You will work with some very driven, kind and intelligent people.
Cons
Where to begin? Let's start with my position within the IT department. If you're looking for a career where you can learn and advance, stay FAR away from this IT dept. Internal promotions essentially do not exist, you will be encouraged to stay in your current position and if an internal position does open up, you will receive only a "courtesy" interview with management not having the intention of considering you for a promotion (if you get an interview at all). The work itself is menial and unfulfilling. Most of your day will consist of manual password resets (because our automated password reset tool has been broken for 6 months) and sending password reset emails to angry patients who cannot log into their patient portal account. You read that correctly: The IT department takes patient calls to assist them with their patient portal. We have a Registration and Patient Access department that should be doing this. You basically work at a call center where you take between 50-90 calls on an almost DAILY basis. Most of my shifts turn into back to back phone calls for almost 8 hours straight. IT management is also a joke. They regularly hire external candidates who have no idea what they are doing in positions that require technical expertise. Recently, an applicant was hired into a Cybersecurity Analyst position who had NO prior professional experience in IT and did not even know how to install Active Directory onto his PC and tried to get the Help Desk to do it for him. There's a little thing called GOOGLE, most IT professionals can at least do their own research or critically think. Recently we hired a person with the intention of them working evening and weekend shifts to ease the load off the full-time people. Turns out he already had a full time job and could not work this schedule. What happened? He was hired anyway and given a schedule that worked around his full time job. He also had no idea what he was doing within IT in general. Evidently no technical questions are asked to vet out candidates who BS their resumes at ALL levels: tiers 1 - 3. Multiple, major IT systems break on an almost daily basis. I'm talking Exchange, Citrix, Meditech... systems that the hospital system rely on to stay operational. This has been going on for months so it is a regular occurrence. Don't even get me started on our Citrix implementation. The TLDR on Citrix is it's a way to host applications on the cloud. You can access the EMR, your email, internal network folders from anywhere. Great idea right? Our implementation of Citrix is extremely slow, local sessions freeze constantly, strange glitches. I can't tell you how many angry doctors and nurses are constantly complaining that our system is so bad it drastically affects patient care. If I got a dollar for every time I heard "At other hospitals their system works fine" I could retire in Rome and never work a day in my life. Did I mention that you also get paid next to nothing unless you are a supervisor or manager? Frederick Health IT pays between 40-60% LESS than the national average for most IT positions. Bottom line: If you want to be demoralized on a daily basis, have no career path, get paid next to nothing, and work with a JOKE of a management team, this is the job for you. Otherwise stay far far away.
