Sallie is the Director of Operational Initiatives for the University of Virginia Health System. Requiring an understanding of the strategic vision of and for the organization, Sallie is responsible for aligning the appropriate resources, both financial and human, to meet the needs of the university’s health system.
Transcript
My name is Sallie Lewis and I work at the UVA Health System. I support the chief financial officer doing health system strategic planning. It entails understanding from a leadership perspective, the vision of and for the organization, and being able to break that vision down into sort of buckets of strategic ideas and goals, and be able to then align your resources towards achieving those goals, after you prioritize them. So it's sort of a living breathing process. So a busy week would be primarily trying to keep the operations healthy. When you're at maximum capacity, and maybe you're having some staffing challenges, and at the same time, you wanna introduce a new idea or execute a pilot in a clinic that's very busy, you've gotta take great care to communicate ahead of time to understand each case. So there's lot of time spent sharing ideas, getting plans to people, making sure they're ready operationally to take on something new, and then following up on something you've implemented to make sure it's working well. One of the recent projects that we have initiated that was along strategic lines was optimizing our ambulatory clinics. We have over 121, exactly 121 currently, physical clinic locations around the state and nearby. And not all of them function in the same way when it comes to the core clinic operations. And so we really want to understand how best to use those resources and especially for the patient coming to different clinics. We wanna make the experience as consistent as possible. So that all starts with some planning to understand what your current condition is, to understand where the biggest gaps are, and then to formulate even further plans to address those gaps, whether it's with streamlining a process, improving the electronic medical record, or something along those lines. It could be people-based with sort of shifting staffing around if we feel we don't have the right mix of skill in one area. But we really want to introduce the fact that clinics are run by teams playing different roles who need to work together, and those teams need to communicate with other teams across boundaries.
Download transcript