October 16 is National Boss’s Day. The idea began back in 1958, and is a day to show some appreciation to your manager for being a great person to work for and for having your back.

Visible signs of this sort of appreciation can be found all over CHRISTUS Health’s headquarters in Irving.  A steady flow of flower bouquets came in through to front desk, and other goodies and cards made their way to well loved leaders’ desks and offices.

However, there was one area of CHRISTUS Health’s building that stood out more than others. Michelle Charles’ team made their praise public. They put their favorite quotes and their own thoughts all over the window that frames Michelle’s CHRISTUS office.

“She’s the best boss ever. It says it all over the window,” said Audra Van Horn with a chuckle.

Audra, a CHRISTUS Health Enterprise Clinical Informaticist, and four of her co-workers put a big effort into making sure others knew all the nice things about their manager, Michelle.

Michelle is the Director of Health Informatics Clinical Content at CHRISTUS Health, and her team is on the forefront of the current technological shift in medicine. They work to improve patient care by linking health care, communications and information technology together. As of late, they’ve handled big projects including bringing Lake Area Hospital in Lake Charles, La. onto the same Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system as the rest of CHRISTUS.

The team says they owe their success to Michelle. Michelle says she owes it to her team.

“It was a whole team effort. I’m telling you it was A LOT of work within a short period of time,” explained Michelle. “We do projects across the whole system enterprise. Like for the transition for Lake Area’s EMR we were able to pull our expertise together and as truly One CHRISTUS. We were able to utilize expertise from all of our ministries. We all came together to make things work and it was great.”

Speaking of great, Michelle and two of her team members Carolyn Weisbard and Tracy Mckinnon recently presented at the MUSE international Health IT Conference in Orlando, Fla. Carolyn and Tracy came in Second place with their presentation about order-set management and were close to presenting to England. Michelle presented on CHRISTUS Health’s Clostridium difficile (C-diff) task force implementation, where C-diff cases were reduced by almost 70 percent over 6 months.

“We have a lot of backing. Michelle always backs us up. That’s why we were there. That’s why we love our boss,” said Tracy.

Happy Boss’ Day to Michelle and all the other awesome CHRISTUS leaders out there. Have similar success stories? Message them to us on Facebook.