The book

Steady Under Pressure

Name: Steady Under Pressure
Author: Edward J. Martimbor

A Practical Guide to Healthcare IT Service Management and Leadership

Lead healthcare IT with confidence, clarity, and resilience. A practical, real-world guide for healthcare IT leaders and service desk managers who keep care moving, systems reliable, and people supported, especially when the pressure is high.

Read Chapter 1 free See the companion workbook

Format: Paperback
Length: 260 pages
Trim size: 6 × 9 in
Contents: 19 chapters, 6 appendices

What you’ll learn

Proven strategies and field-tested lessons

Drawing on more than 30 years of hands-on experience, the book delivers prescriptive guidance for building a high-performing, reliable, and patient-focused IT service operation.

Build a service desk that delivers consistent, high-quality support.
Lead, develop, and retain a strong IT support team.
Apply ITIL-inspired best practices without the complexity.
Align IT services with clinical and operational goals.
Prepare for, respond to, and recover from disruptions.
Use metrics and continuous improvement to drive results.

Whether you’re a new manager or a seasoned IT leader, Steady Under Pressure gives you a clear, actionable framework to lead with purpose, keep operations stable, and make sure technology supports what matters most: exceptional patient care.

Free sample

Read Chapter 1

Healthcare IT: When Technology Supports Patient Care

A retail system failure can interrupt transactions. In healthcare, a technology failure can affect how information reaches the people making decisions about patient care. Chapter 1 shows how to tell an available system apart from a clinical workflow that staff can actually use.

A technology inventory tells you what the organization owns. A workflow map tells you what the organization depends on.
Leadership principle, Chapter 1

Inside the chapter: start with the clinical workflow · patient care begins at registration · define impact before assigning priority · treat communication as part of restoration · make ownership unambiguous · an illustrative scenario where the system is up but results are late · your first 30 days: a four-week action plan.

Includes the title page, copyright page, full table of contents, and all of Chapter 1.

The Chapter 1 sample PDF will be available here soon.

Table of contents

What’s inside

Front matter

Dedication
Author's Note
Preface
Introduction: The Work Behind the Screen

Part I: Foundations

1. Healthcare IT: When Technology Supports Patient Care
2. Understanding the Healthcare Technology Environment
3. Building a Service Desk That Clinicians Trust

Part II: Operational Excellence

4. Incident Management When Every Minute Matters
5. Major Incidents, Downtime, and Clinical Impact
6. Problem Management and Long-Term Stability
7. Change Management Without Disrupting Care
8. Service Catalogs, SLAs, and Accountability
9. Email Security, Cyber Threats, and Protecting Patient Information
10. When Disaster Strikes: Preparedness, Backups, and Recovery
11. Technology as a Force Multiplier
12. Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare IT

Part III: Leadership and Management

13. Building and Leading High-Performing IT Teams
14. Measuring What Matters in Healthcare IT
15. Governance, Compliance, and Risk Management
16. Managing Vendors, Budgets, and Limited Resources

Part IV: Building a Sustainable Operation

17. Preventing Burnout and Developing Resilient Teams
18. Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement
19. Thirty Years of Lessons in Healthcare IT Leadership

Appendices

A. Service Desk Management Checklists
B. Major Incident Response Playbook
C. Change Management and Risk Assessment Templates
D. Healthcare IT Performance Metrics
E. 90-Day IT Service Management Improvement Plan
F. Plain-Language Healthcare IT Glossary