Summer Internship: UIHC


By: Michael Baca
Hello from Iowa City! This summer I am serving as the operations administrative intern at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics under Mr. Sabi Singh who is the co-Chief Operating Officer. UIHC is Iowa’s only comprehensive academic medical center with 705 inpatient beds. During the 2013 fiscal year, UIHC totaled over 31,000 admitted patients and 975,000 clinic visits.

My internship has just begun here at UIHC and I am excited to get rolling. The majority of my projects thus far have been working with Ben Hall, who is an alumnus of the program, in O.R. administration. I have worked on identifying payment discrepancies (expected versus actual payments from insurers) by procedure. As I get further along in this project, I will dig deeper into specific cases to try and identify why these discrepancies exist (example: a coding error). Additionally, I have been analyzing case-length time in the OR by service line. Case length begins when the patient is brought into the OR and ends when they leave the OR. The goal is to improve efficiencies and identify best practice physicians and service lines. Beginning next week I will be observing some surgical cases.

At the very beginning of my summer, UIHC hosted a “Service Excellence” event where senior leaders come to talk about the importance of “going the extra inch” to make every patient’s experience a positive one. It was great to see how committed senior leadership is to the cause and to see them speaking to frontline staff about the importance of service excellence.   

In my spare time and on the weekends, I have been enjoying the great outdoors. Most of this time has been spent fishing, but also includes runs, hikes, bonfires and occasionally flying RC planes with a middle school student that I mentor. Later on this summer, I will be traveling throughout the Midwest (Wisconsin, Kansas, and Arkansas) to visit some of my close friends (one of which works on a big cat wildlife refuge – so I’m fairly excited to get up close with lions and tigers).

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