Charleston VA’s David Olivera: facilitator for staff and vets

“I always look at how to improve the IT services this facility provides to its customers. You have to be customer-service driven,” he says

David Olivera is operations manager for the Charleston VA, responsible for all IT ops. Most of the time he also supervises or leads the projects.

Cutting-edge IT tools are at hand for doctors and nurses at the big Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) facility in Charleston, SC. That’s because David Olivera and his staff are constantly working out ways to support medical practice and boost service to vets.

Olivera is operations manager for the Charleston facility. That makes him responsible for all IT operations, and most of the time he also supervises or leads the projects.

“We tend to be a hotbed for visionary projects,” Olivera says, with the “vision” originating with the hospital’s chief of staff. “She’s dedicated to improving services to the veterans. If there’s a new methodology or clinical procedure, local or nationwide, we’re the ones who test it. At any time we can have fifteen major projects going,” Olivera says.

Ideas to fruition
One current project is the beta testing of a computerized system for anesthesia. Records of gases, formerly hand-kept, are now transferred to an electronic file. “When the anesthesiologists explained it to me, I thought it was an amazing project,” Olivera says. “How do you computerize something like that? They’re gases!”

Olivera’s career has been based on bringing such ideas to fruition. He grew up in Brooklyn, NY, one of eight children of Puerto Rican immigrants. Although his first job after high school was at a VA center, it had nothing to do with computers. In the early 1990s he was a ward clerk in the VA facility in Brooklyn, NY. “Ward clerks don’t even exist anymore,” he says.

The idea of IT
It didn’t take long for the IT bug to bite. “Back then we had terminals; we didn’t even have PCs. That’s where I got my idea of IT,” Olivera says.

The VA in Brooklyn merged with the one in Manhattan, becoming the New York Harbor Healthcare System. Staff members who were near retirement were taking buyouts at the time, and current VA employees were given opportunities to fill high-demand areas.

That gave Olivera the chance to train in IT. The city of New York sponsored his training to become a Certified Network Engineer, which he completed in 1999 through Touro College
in Manhattan.

His first job, starting in 1993, was clinical processing apps coordinator, a liaison between VA healthcare services and the IT department. Olivera handled database query searches and helped with VA’s transition to a computerized patient records system, an electronic record that is more or less standard practice in hospitals today.

A stint in visual arts
The training program that gave him his certification in 1999 was designed to help VA employees make the transition to the private sector. Olivera was curious about non-government jobs, and in 2000 he found a job as senior tech support for the School of Visual Arts (New York, NY). He was working in a college environment and with artists: “One of my favorite jobs of all time!” he says.

As senior technical advisor he was deep into supervision of the IT shop and the media staff, “and I was a network admin at the same time,” he says. “It was a chic job! We had offices in the penthouse of the residence hall and we could see all of Manhattan from there.”

Back to VA
But he and his wife were starting a family, and they wanted to raise their children outside the big city, so Olivera went back to VA. He became an IT specialist in Orlando, FL, just as that facility transitioned from a clinic to a free-standing hospital.

He moved to the Charleston VA in 2005. One of his favorite aspects of the current job is management, he says with a smile. He supervises sixteen IT employees. Just about everyone he supervises is older than he is, and he gets a kick out of seeking the potential in each one and encouraging them all to pursue what they love.

He’s also involved in recruiting at multicultural schools like local HBCUs. He would also like to see more Hispanic IT students take jobs in the VA system.

Growth opportunities
Olivera takes his role seriously. As a facilitator who can identify and solve the needs of the clinical admin staff and the vets, “I always look at how to improve the services we provide to our customers so they can take care of their customers. You have to be customer-service driven,” he says.

He enjoys the work in Charleston and hopes to eventually move into the CIO position there. Last year he finally received his BS in IT management from Touro University. By the end of this summer he hopes to complete his MS in project management from George Washington University (Washington, DC) and also get his project management professional (PMP) certification.

Those and other growth opportunities, plus the chance to directly help veterans, have made his job super-fulfilling, he says.

“When I saw the position and it was described to me by the CIO, I knew this was what I wanted.

“It’s been everything I envisioned,” Olivera concludes. “The VA director is amazing. This facility is now rated second in quality and ninth in overall customer satisfaction among 153 VA medical centers. It feels great to be part of that!”