Bandhavi Gollapudi (MHA '23): Unity Point Health - St. Luke's Hospital
Greetings from Cedar Rapids! As I write this post, I am glancing back upon my incredible summer internship at UnityPoint Health - St. Luke's Hospital. A little fun fact about St. Luke's Hospital is that nearly ten alumni from the Iowa MHA program work in this region. I wanted to be able to draw from their career experiences and be able to put them towards mine. My direct preceptor, Joe Linn (MHA' 85), the Vice President of Human Resources & Operations, offers insights into the complexity of the healthcare industry.
UnityPoint Health as a system (UPH Hospitals, UPH Clinics, and UPH @ Home) provides care to metropolitan and rural areas across Iowa, western Illinois, and southern Wisconsin. St. Luke's Hospital prides itself on caring for the community for more than 139 years with the latest technology and innovation and best of the best providers for the patients served. Their guiding mission in everyday function is to give "the healthcare we'd like our loved ones to receive." This is noticeable from the frontline team members to the support staff all way up to the providers; they want to see their community prosper.
With the help of my preceptor, we were able to find multiple projects throughout the hospital for me to understand hospital administration better. Working with Lori Weih, Director of Community Engagement, we focused on the "Conversations of BELONGING at St. Luke's," which was an effort from the DEI department to voice Black & Hispanic team members' concerns and opinions about their experiences working at St. Luke's. Another major project which I got to lead was the "Welcome Back Program," where I collaborated with the HR and TA staff to send out a list of names of those who have left St. Luke's Hospital in the last three years in an effort to hire them back on as full time or PRN.
Historically, St. Luke's Hospital has been known as the "Heart Hospital of Cedar Rapids" I was fortunate to be able to work on a cross-functional benchmark project with Director of Cardiovascular Services, Justin McDonald (MHA' 11) & Andrea Watkinson, Director of Cancer Center & Services, which was presented in the Strategy Council bi-weekly meeting. We discussed the structure of current practices in place and ways to increase and generate revenue for the Radiation Oncology service line. Working on this project gave insight into the complexity of the hospital, which is not visible to the naked eye.St. Luke's Hospital is one of the few centers throughout the US and the only one in the Midwest where they have its own Generate lab. Generate is a medical maker space where clinicians, other hospital team members, and even patients can come to create devices, tools, or maybe a new process to help provide better care for the patients. I got the chance to learn how to use CAD (Computer-Aided Design) software to 3D print small trinkets for the nurses and assist in the silicone molding of a toe brace for a 10-year-old in Rehab. I also had the chance to shadow OR nurses and patient care technicians (PCTs) to gain a better understanding of how OR and ED are very different from working on the Med/Surg floor.
*A Note From The Editor*
If you would like to keep up with Bandhavi, you can find her here on LinkedIn!
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