Reflecting on 2020- A Year Of Challenges And Change
The end of one year and the start of another always seems to inspire us to reflect. This time of year is typically is filled with wrapping up projects while wrapping presents, planning strategic initiatives for the coming year while planning family celebrations, and reflecting on personal accomplishments while analyzing data from the year. Without stating the obvious, 2020 has been a challenging (to put it lightly) year marked by historical events and unforeseen difficulties in both our working and home lives. It has also been a year of learning for all of us, both at the team and individual level.
Like countless others, Extract Systems’ staff have been finding their way through the foreign and uncertain days of 2020, planning Zoom wedding receptions, socially distancing from family and friends, leaning on schools to teach kids remotely, and trying to make sense of a year that has no doubt been defined by a deadly pandemic.
On a business level, for the first time ever in my (still early career), I saw life and work meld together. Kids were now doing schoolwork where their parents were conducting Zoom meetings, with dogs and cats vowing for attention during random points in meetings. It really humanized and made some of our interactions, both internal and external, more authentic than I’ve ever seen.
I saw our Extract team came together (honestly like never before) to discover, strategize, and implement new ways to help our customers and partners rapidly react to the changing nature of business and customer experience. We struggled, laughed, brainstormed, and truly came together as a team to ‘weather’ the pandemic storm- together.
There will be lasting effects from 2020, and it’s truly impossible to predict what these might be… everything is changing, but that isn’t always a bad thing, as the actions we take today inform the paths we take forward.
Both our Professional Services and Engineering Teams didn’t waste a second getting up to speed on how we can help our clients. For example, many businesses may have found it necessary to scan many hardcopy documents that previously had been dropped on someone’s desk. Providing solutions that can automatically classify scanned documents, route the documents to the appropriate parties, index them for easy retrieval, and generate reports and dashboards and show trends in the documents and their data over time. For our healthcare clients that might have been learning new document types and scaling document volumes due to COVID-19 testing and hospitalizations, quickly. For government clients, it could have meant they needed to create online records access, which might not have been a top priority for some states and counties, but during a pandemic with many forced to work from home, digitized records have become more of a need than a want.
After March, almost all scheduled in-person events were canceled, and we knew if we wanted to do any type of networking it would need to be virtual. Our Marketing team put together our first ever virtual trade show, the HealthyData Virtual Academy, where we had several speakers in the HIM world give presentations on ways we can ‘reimagine healthcare.’ We offered free CEU credits to attendees at the event as our way to say ‘thank-you’ to our healthcare workers. It was a great success, we had over 300 attendees and positive feedback.
What a year. A year of discomfort. A year of uncertainty. A year of worry and fear. A year of isolation and cancelled plans. A year of staying at home. A year of waiting. A year of slowing down. A year of newer expectations. A year to take a deep breath. A year to remind yourself what is really important. A year that has opened my eyes (and I’m sure many others). A year of learning. A year that has been truly significant and special in its own odd way.
On a personal note, there is so much I want to say about this year. So much happened behind the scenes that was hard and challenging and are things I am still dealing with today. But even more so I want to talk about how 2020 has bettered me. How this year has opened my eyes to SO MUCH. This year let (more like forced) me to get comfortable with slowing down, taking time to breathe, and focusing on what’s truly important.
There will come a time when the smell of hand sanitizer will no longer trigger an emotional response and the parking lots at stadiums and event centers will be filled with sports fans rather than COVID-19 test sites. And while so much sadness has filled 2020, we cannot forget all the lessons it has taught us- get comfortable with change and uncertainty, keep evolving, get outside, and be kind.
Wishing all of Extract’s partners, customers – current and future, and employees a wonderful and bright 2021!
