Dillon Sampson (MHA '23): University of Utah Health Care

Hello from Salt Lake City!

This summer, I had the pleasure of completing my administrative internship at the University of Utah Health. Located in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains, the University of Utah Health Care (UUHC) is a fully comprehensive Academic Medical Center with 638 beds and is designated as a Level 1 Trauma Center. The University of Utah Health is the only university health care system in the state of Utah and provides patient care for the people of Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and much of Nevada. This summer, I spent my time working with Donna Roach, the Chief Information Officer (CIO), and her Information Technology Systems (ITS) team. Donna has a diverse background of being the CIO at other large health organizations and came to UUHC in 2020. With this background, she has brought many new innovative ideas which have made great changes and also been very interesting to see carried out. 

Upon arriving to Utah, Donna tasked me to get familiar with UUHC’s long-term strategy, “Strategy 2025”. Laid out by the University of Utah’s President and Senior Vice President for Health Sciences the document establishes seven main pillars that are made up of directed steps. The directed steps are the changes the organization knows they want to make in the years leading to 2025 and are assigned a step owner. Donna has taken Strategy 2025 and identified the digital themes she saw within it. These themes helped establish the creation of a digital strategy and digital road map for the ITS team. One of the projects I worked on this summer was helping conduct strategy meetings with Donna. These meetings were to directed step owners about the organization’s digital strategy. This was done to make the digital strategy known to leadership and to get feedback on if we were missing anything. Bringing in outside opinions allowed us to identify things needing to be added to the digital roadmap. This was an exciting project that gave me exposure to high-level strategy and leadership. 

Aside from strategy, Donna also wanted me to work on a project that was tied to a directed step. After meeting with many leaders across the organization, I was able to find a project involving MyChart, Epic’s patient portal. This project fell under the “Innovative Care” pillar and the directed step was described as, “deploy a sustainable model for patient communications to support provider resilience and patient experience”. The origins of this project started before I arrived, but provider wellness surveys conducted by UUHC identified that providers were experiencing burnout due to high volumes of MyChart messages. Six multidisciplinary teams were then formed that were composed of different types of staff such as physicians, nurses, medical assistants, administrators, and patient experience team members. These teams were then tasked with coming up with recommended solutions. The project manager and I then brought the technical solutions to ITS to identify what can be done, what the functionality of the solution is, and when the solution could be implemented. We received some great feedback and were able to build some proto-type MyChart pages to see what the intended changes would look like. There will be many great things that come out of this project and hopefully, it can eliminate some burnout for our providers and give the patient a better experience. 

This summer, I had exposure to challenging projects, strong leadership, and a truly patient-centered health organization. With all that being said, I also had a great summer enjoying Utah. Located within minutes of the mountains, I was able to hike and play golf on a regular basis. I was also visited by my family, undergraduate college friends, and girlfriend. We were able to explore all that Salt Lake City has to offer and check out the National Parks in southern Utah. Finally, I was able to reconnect with my elementary school best friend who moved to Utah around the same time as I. We set a goal of summiting one of the local mountain peaks and on my very last weekend, we were able to summit Mount Timpanogos. This has been an unforgettable summer that I have so many wonderful individuals to thank for it. 

*A Note From The Editor*

If you would like to keep up with Dillon, you can find him here on LinkedIn!

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