Rebecca Sykes

I've spent 25 years building my career in healthcare, starting from the ground up as an analyst and working my way through the ranks. After about a year and a half, I became a supervisor, and then another year later, I became the Director of Medical Records. I held that position for several years before advancing to Chief Information Officer for Mercy Health, where I oversaw operations across 28 hospitals in 5 states for 21 years. In that role, I managed budgets, developed strategy, led the Epic Rollout Team for our electronic health record system, and maintained an open-door policy with my staff, meeting with them regularly and making sure they had everything they needed to do their jobs. My most notable achievement was successfully rolling out Epic across all 28 hospitals in 5 states. I retired in 2018, but when the CEO at Naples Hospital, who used to work at Mercy, reached out and asked me to implement Epic for them, I came out of retirement. I brought my whole team back with me, and we spent 3 years completing that implementation during the pandemic. Now I'm truly retired and living in Naples, Florida, because I don't like the winters in Cincinnati anymore.