Katie Cooke takes lead on UPMC project with system-wide impact
UPMC sees more than 375,000 inpatient admissions to its 40 hospitals every year; if each patient is visited by the recommended two to three people, that adds up to a lot of people passing through the doors each day.
An administrative resident at UPMC Magee-Women’s Hospital
and second-year MHA student Katie Cooke has taken the lead on a project to make
the visitor experience standard across the entire system.
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| Visitors sign in at UPMC Hamot Hospital (Credit: Katie Cooke) |
Working in Magee’s operations department, Cooke says she’s gotten hands-on experience in several initiatives in both the hospital and across the UPMC system.
“This experience has provided broad exposure to healthcare
operations while also allowing me to take ownership of several meaningful
projects,” she said.
Perhaps the biggest project is the visitor management
initiative, which implements a standardized process to enhance safety and
operational efficiency. The project introduced a new approach to verifying visitors'
identities, conducting security screenings, and issuing badges for access to
inpatient units at its pilot site, Erie’s UPMC Hamot hospital.
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| Katie Cooke |
“Beyond the technology itself, the pilot is intended to help
develop a scalable operational model that can be implemented at other UPMC
facilities in the future,” said Cooke.
Cooke’s residency preceptor is Magee-Women’s Hospital Vice
President for Operations Chris Vitsas, who was leading the visitor management project
on the operations side.
“As the project continued to grow, I became increasingly
involved in supporting planning, workflow development, stakeholder
coordination, and go-live readiness activities,” she said. “Over time, Visitor
Management became the primary project I supported throughout my residency.”
Because of the project's scale and visibility, it gave Cooke
opportunities to work closely with system and hospital leaders across many
areas, including operations, security, IT, nursing, communications and the
executive suite.
“It's been an incredibly rewarding experience. As a
resident, it's not often that you get the opportunity to be involved in a
project with this level of visibility and system-wide impact,” she said, adding
that coordinating so many units challenged her to build relationships without
direct authority, balance competing priorities and pushed her outside of her
comfort zone allowing her to develop skills that are crucial for career success
but are difficult to learn in a classroom alone.
The new visitor management system launched at UPMC Hamot this
summer, which, after so much behind-the-scenes work, Cooke says, is incredibly
rewarding after countless hours mapping workflows, holding subgroup meetings
and working out the system bugs before a visitor even touched it. “Seeing the
process go live and hearing feedback from staff and visitors has made the
effort feel worthwhile. At the same time, implementation is really just the
beginning,” she added.
With the system live at the pilot site, now the focus shifts
to learning from it, gathering data and refining the process, all while continuing
to improve the experience for patients, visitors and staff.
While much of the process helped her develop skills not
taught in the classroom, Cooke says the project's foundation came from what she
learned in her first-year classes.
“One of the biggest takeaways from the MHA program has been
understanding how strategy translates into operations,” she said. “Classes
focused on leadership and process improvement were particularly relevant.”
With a massive undertaking like this under her belt,
allowing her to improve her project and change management skills and teaching
her how to navigate complex assignments that have ambiguities and often
competing priorities, Cooke says she returns to campus with a better appreciation
for how concepts discussed play out in the real world.
She adds that her time with Magee-Women’s Hospital
operations has reinforced her interests in that side of health care, especially
for project-based work that requires bringing people together to solve problems,
improve processes and support organizational goals.
“One of the biggest lessons I've learned throughout the
residency is that implementation is rarely as straightforward as it looks from
the outside. Success depends on much more than technology or initial process
design,” she said. “I'm incredibly grateful to the mentors and leaders who
invested in my development throughout the residency and provided opportunities
to contribute in meaningful ways.”
