JoAnn Harbison likes to solve problems, particularly when she can use technology to do so to help everyday people.
"To be able to take technology and solve problems for public service, that just gives it that much more value," Harbison said. "I'm not making widgets, I'm not generating dollars for an industry; it impacts people's lives."
Harbison is a service client manager working for the Missouri Office of Administration's information technology department. Harbison, along with her staff of about 30 people, works with the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services to address any IT needs it might have. She began serving in her current role in 2019 but has been serving the state of Missouri since 1994.
She recently received the State Up and Comer award from StateScoop for her work in quickly developing and implementing the state's electronic system for collecting COVID-19 case data from laboratories around the state.
"Certainly, being one who likes to be behind the scenes, I went, 'Oh dear, this is way more radar than I prefer,'" Harbison said about the award. "It's wonderful to be recognized for the work you do. IT very rarely gets the opportunity to directly be able to influence folks' lives."
Harbison, who also worked on the multi-year project to transfer WIC from a check to a card system, said the benefit people receive on the other end of her work is what keeps her in the field. While IT isn't typically the face, Harbison said, technology supports the infrastructure of many state departments to be more efficient and serve more people.
Harbison's passion for IT and public service started with a college internship with Missouri's Department of Transportation as a developer. Quickly, Harbison said, she realized she was far too social to be a developer, which requires little interaction with others.
She switched to more of a user-support role at MoDOT before moving to the DHSS help desk in 1997. After a series of other positions and projects, Harbison said, she moved back to application development, becoming the project manager for the DHSS Rhapsody software, which collects real-time data regarding the chief complaint among hospital emergency rooms around the state.
Harbison's work put in place a disease surveillance system that supported COVID-19 reporting directly from labs, cutting down on the amount of time, money and people required for the state's public health response to slow the spread.
In a previous typical year, Harbison said, the state's disease surveillance system tracked fewer than 200,000 lab results from more than 90 reportable conditions. During the peak of COVID-19, she said, 60,000 lab results were run every day. The system couldn't keep up.
Over the course of two months, a new disease surveillance system was obtained from a vendor, deployed and went live. Within a few hours, Harbison said, 6,000 results were pulled from larger reference labs and cases were made without any manual intervention.
"That has been a cornerstone of being able to get that data in from those who are reporting results out to those public health professionals to work those cases - the contact tracing, and that sort of thing, getting that quarantine guidance out," she said. "Without that system, we wouldn't have gotten there."
Harbison said time was of the essence amid the pandemic, so it was crucial to leverage technology to get case information in the hands of the Department of Health and Senior Services and public health professionals.
"Time is important, so to be able to leverage the technology to get that in the hands of the department to enable their public health response, that will be a star on my career that I take away as I move on to other things at some point," Harbison said. "That will always be a star on my career from my perspective."