On September 16, 2024, Coudersport Rotary Club hosted Casey Klesa, Senior Data Communications Specialist at UPMC, as our speaker. Casey Klesa is the grandson of Rotarian Jim Plotts.

Casey has worked in Information Technology (IT) for 25 years. His interest started when he was 8 or 9 years old, when his grandfather, Rotarian Jim Plotts, set him down at a computer. He is thankful to have been exposed to this field at an early age. In college, he majored in Information Systems. He also worked at college, maintaining their computer labs and teaching courses. He started in programming but developed an interest in the hardware end of things. One of his professors was the Chief Information Officer at UPMC, and frequently came to Casey for ideas, which worked!

Upon graduation, he was offered a position at Susquehanna Health, where he started in 1999. Casey is responsible for security, server teams, infrastructure and maintenance, for voice (phone systems), computers, printers, and servers at 6 hospitals, 45 doctors’ offices, and 20,000 devices including phones, laptops, printers and their connections. His role is crucial in getting the medical results and information to provide your care. He has been a jack-of-all-trades, maintaining PC’s, servers and networks. There is a security team but he has to understand their issues in order to protect patient data and privacy. There
are security cameras operating 24/7. His goal is 99.999% up time.

There are lots of moving parts for which he is responsible, as UPMC merges and brings on new hospitals. Each has its own systems, and there is a process for integrating with all new hospitals. In 2018 Cole Hospital merged with UPMC and they are still working on ‘bridges,’ with the goal of having electronic medical records the same across the enterprise.

His entire career has been change, as there is continually new technology and systems. He does everything from laying data cable in ceilings to putting computers in place. His main focus now has been network communications in voice. They have just upgraded 5 hospitals’ phones, (5,000 phones) which took a year.
Every day 40 hospital teams meet on a call to confer. He works with a lot of people in Pittsburgh daily, where the data centers are located. They assess the needs for upgrades and new technology. He supports 2500 pieces of software to support Cole Hospital. Wellsboro’s hospital (Soldiers & Sailors, now UPMC Wellsboro) has a different system, so he has to start with
wiring to integrate systems with them as for all new hospitals.

Casey also deals with the Internet of “Things”. Light fixtures are connected to a network in order to minimize energy use. Phones connect to the network as well as pc’s and printers to reduce phone bills.

Thank you Casey for your interesting and very informative presentation!