Daniela Crivianu-Gaita
DANIELA CRIVIANU-GAITA
Vice-President, Information Management and Technology, and Chief Information Officer, The Hospital for Sick Children
WHAT SETS HER APART
Daniela provides strategic direction for all information management and technology services at the hospital
Completed deals this year: 8
Number of committees: 19, including the GO Network Provincial Steering Committee of the Ministry of Government Services
HER CHAMPION
Mary Jo Haddad, President and CEO, The Hospital for Sick Children.
From Mary Jo Haddad
As told to Kate Daley
I first met Daniela in 1999, not long after she had started at Sick Kids. She had a stellar resume and was new to Canada. Oftentimes when people come to Canada they don’t come into the workforce at the same level as they left the workforce in the country from which they’ve come [Daniela is from Romania]. It’s always a huge challenge for immigrants. But it didn’t take very long to see the brilliance in this woman. She was incredibly talented, very smart and had taken on brilliant leadership initiatives in Romania.
When we first met, she was a little shy and she had a major challenge with English as a second language. I was asked by the then chief information officer to mentor her. He saw in her something no one else had seen and he was bang on. It took her a couple of years to acclimatize to the culture in Canada and to get her English where it needed to be, but it was pretty damn clear that her tech skills were phenomenal, as was her ability to execute projects. Those continue to be her strengths as her profile grows within the organization.
At the bedside of our critically ill patients, we had technology systems set up to capture and monitor all treatment data. As the hospital became more sophisticated in our technology, we needed to integrate all those individual systems. Daniela led the introduction of a bedside system [T3 or “Tracking, Trigger and Trajectory”] that connected all the patients and units in the hospital into one large system. The data is displayed on an interactive, web-based system. This will enrich clinician discussions, improve learning and enhance communication. It was a huge, complex job where Daniela had to please many, many people. She worked for two and a half years with a consulting team. I had the pleasure of being in the room when that system went live.
That was a moment I’ll always remember—it was one of the smoothest system uploads of an integrated system that the world-renowned consulting team had ever seen. She was confident before it went live. And there is something wonderful about a confident leader, especially when she has every right to be confident.
She’s a champion of women leaders in non-traditional roles. She gets invited to speak nationally and internationally on IT and information management technology and also gets invited to conferences in broader business because she has a reputation for having tremendous impact.
One of her greatest gifts is recognizing the contribution of others. I will thank her for a big accomplishment and she always replies to my emails and says something like “other people were also instrumental in making this happen” and copies them on the email. It’s all these little things that she does to make sure people know about their contribution to her success.