After a half-century of ophthalmology experience — with 25 of those years spent at Wilmer Eye Institute, Johns Hopkins Medicine — Mike Hartnett is set to retire in the coming weeks. Hartnett reflects on her career and the success of Wilmer’s technician training program, and discusses what’s next.
Mike Hartnett, certified ophthalmic technician and former ophthalmic clinical supervisor of Wilmer’s float pool, began her career in ophthalmology by chance. It was during the early 1970s in Chagrin Falls, a small town in eastern Ohio just outside of Cleveland. Hartnett was newly divorced with two small children, no college degree and, according to her, no marketable skills. However, she accepted an opportunity as a medical assistant for an internist at a multispecialty health care practice. In addition to being the doctor’s right-hand aide, Hartnett was hired to take patients’ vital signs, perform electrocardiograms and carry out other duties.
As fate would have it, a week before starting the position, the assistant in the ophthalmology department abruptly resigned. When Hartnett arrived to begin her career as a medical assistant, the office had other plans.
“Here, you sit here,” she recalls being told, as she was directed to sit in the vacant seat left by the previous office secretary. “You work in the eye department instead.”
While Hartnett was nervous she was determined to succeed. Her job was multifaceted: Not only did she answer the phones and sift through paperwork, but the doctors trained her to assess visual acuity and administer eyedrops. She worked at that practice for a few years, learning new skills and taking advantage of new opportunities.
“I enjoyed working with those doctors,” says Hartnett. “They were great. I learned a lot from them.”
In 1986, she began working at Retina Associates of Cleveland, a larger practice with satellite locations across Ohio’s northeastern quadrant. There, she worked alongside former Wilmer vitreoretinal surgical fellows Michael Novak and Lawrence Singerman. She screened patients, checked eye pressure, learned how to perform ophthalmic angiography and A- and B-scans, and acquired many other skills.
Hartnett was soon assigned to be clinical trial coordinator for the practice’s participation in the Collaborative Ocular Melanoma Study (COMS). During the nearly decade-long, multicenter, multipronged and randomized clinical trial, which was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, clinicians and researchers compared different therapies for choroidal melanoma.
In this role, Hartnett also functioned as an echographer, using standardized ultrasound to measure tumor dimensions. Joint clinical trials such as the COMS involved periodic meetings of all principal investigators and study support staff members to review data and processes. During one meeting, Hartnett met the former director of clinical trials at Wilmer Eye Institute, professor emeritus Barbara Hawkins, who offered her a new opportunity at Johns Hopkins. “We’re thinking about you for a position on a new clinical trial,” Hartnett recalls Hawkins saying. “We’d want you to be a traveling visual acuity monitor.”
By this time, Hartnett’s children were grown and the family dog had died. She decided to accept the position at the institute, sell the family home in Cleveland, and move to Baltimore. In November 1997, Hartnett began working at Wilmer, for the Submacular Surgery Trials.
A quality control position, the visual acuity monitor helped ensure that the refractometry protocol was followed precisely. Hartnett, along with two other Wilmer traveling ophthalmic technicians, visited each clinical trial site multiple times per year to refract local study participants and assess protocol adherence by each site’s technicians.
During the five years that Hartnett worked with the Submacular Surgery Trials and other clinical trials, she became a globetrotter. She attended conferences and meetings around the world, from North America to Europe, Japan to Taiwan. “It was amazing,” Hartnett says about the experience. “I got to see so many things I never could have seen on my own. I met so many people. It showed me how small a world ophthalmology is.”
That global sense of community, she says, helped her connect with a network of ophthalmology professionals. Her favorite destination was Örebro, Sweden. After checking into her hotel room, she saw that people were celebrating the arrival of spring at the Örebro Castle — a massive medieval structure that is now the governor’s residence. Town members had lit a bonfire by the moat, and Hartnett thought it was only right to join them.
“I walked down there with a sense of community,” she recalls. “The arrival of Spring is a basic human experience. It was nice to see it celebrated so far from home.”
When the Submacular Surgery Trials ended, Hartnett was chosen to lead once again. In November 2003, she took the helm of the float pool and the technician training program. Although the float pool existed, there was a need for full-time staffing, educational training and certification.
The float pool’s mission is twofold: most importantly, to perfuse the system with highly trained and skilled ophthalmic technicians, and secondarily, to cover for staff absences and assist in the launch of small ventures at Wilmer that do not have funding for full-time technical staff.
Today, nearly 20% of all Wilmer technicians began their career in the float pool. “We hire people with absolutely no experience in ophthalmology at all,” Hartnett says. “We have a classroom setting where trainees learn about the theory behind what we do, as well as observe and work hands-on in the clinic.”
Hartnett says the program has been very successful over the last 20 years. She credits the ambition and tenacity of the ophthalmic technician trainees, who have excelled at the opportunity to became highly-skilled. Many come from humble beginnings like her own.
“There have been a lot people like me who don’t have a lot of formal education or a lot of opportunity,” Hartnett says. “We give them opportunities. We give them the skills so that they can become lifetime employed.”
Hartnett says her best moments in float pool are when trainees are bitten by the “ophthalmology bug.” She enjoys sitting around at lunchtime listening to technicians discuss cases and delve into the world of ophthalmology.
Today, her biggest hope is that the training program will continue to thrive and flourish, producing technicians with top-notch talent who are able to use acquired transferrable skills to achieve upward mobility.
For now, she’s looking forward to moving to upstate New York and spending time with family, most notably her 9-year-old grandson, whom she’s excited about accompanying to his various music lessons — a new opportunity to learn.