Ms. Stump also took on the role of vice dean of information technology at the Icahn School of Medicine. The system as a whole has 50,000 employees including thousands of clinicians and researchers across eight hospitals and 400 clinical practices. What was her first order of business? Aligning her teams.
“I dived in early to really understand the strengths of the team and the needs of the organization,” she said during an interview with the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast,” set to launch in the coming weeks. “In just the last three months, I’ve had the opportunity to reorganize and restructure my leadership team to position us for what I think are really necessary priorities and goals in the coming year, and to set us up well to operate in the environment we serve.”
One of her early priorities has been optimizing the way Mount Sinai leverages data assets. The health system has a high performance compute environment that supports research conducted through the Icahn School of Medicine. But operational and managerial reporting had been done in a distributed way, which held the system back.
“I’ve had the opportunity to stand up a new enterprisewide data team that is working to leverage those data assets in a more meaningful way to help the organization understand how we’re performing, where our opportunities are for improvement, and whether or not we’re actually moving the needle,” Ms. Stump said. “Creating that easier access to information, not just separate stores of data, has been a really early win for the organization and me.”
There was a long history of distributed data sources with individual departments and teams having their own sources of data and databases; they conducted the analysis and produced their own reports and dashboards. The siloed approach to data gathering produced disastrous results, and Ms. Stump is working with her team to change that.
“You get really smart people in the room, but each has their own set of data that’s conflicting and it’s really hard to then make an informed decision,” she said. “One of the biggest things we’ll do to set the organization up for success is have a clean set of organizational metrics tied to the goals we need to achieve with a clear and viewable set of the definitions around those metrics.”
The data will help the team understand whether their efforts are making a difference. They need a strong governance model and an accessible, common source of data easily viewable by all. There was initial trepidation about having others gather and analyze data after leaders of each department had done it for so long, but the team is coming around.
“Very quickly people see the benefit of that common source of truth that we can all operate from, and with so much change so quickly, without data, we could quickly lose our way,” said Ms. Stump. “That’s going to have a really significant impact.”
