Jeffery Hudson-Covolo, DNP, RN, serves as Vice President for Patient Care Services and Chief Nurse Executive for Sierra View Medical Center.
On May 11th, Jeffery Hudson-Covolo will serve as a panelist at Becker's Health IT + Clinical Leadership 2018. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place May 10-11th 2018 in Chicago.
To learn more about the conference and Jeffrery's session, click here.
Question: As a leader, what is the best investment you made in your own professional development in the past five years?
Jeffery Hudson-Covolo: I took time to return to school and earn my Doctor of Nursing Practice degree in Healthcare Systems Leadership. Returning to school to pursue a terminal degree has afforded me the formal education to ask "why" and seek out the "why." As a scientist and scholar, you facilitate your work with others much differently. I think much more about down-stream effects and events, and anticipate barriers and cogs from those who may not have the same hyper focus on intended versus actual outcomes.
Q: Please share a new consumer-centric capability your organization has built or tapped into within the last 18 months.
JHC: We opened an urgent care department of the hospital. This service line was needed to support the community based on research and a feedback loop. After seven months, the urgent care center is already at capacity, and the anticipated 10 percent shift in emergency department volume from the hospital to the urgent care center did not occur. This is new volume for the organization on top of an increasing volume in the ED. We are now making plans for a second site for urgent care services to be provided in a second location in our community.
Q: Who and what are the disrupters that have your attention? Why?
JHC: We have a hospital that has closed in our geographic region suddenly, and they are located about 25 miles from us. There is another full-service hospital about 15 miles from the hospital that closed. Both organizations are feeling the crunch of additional patients and their needs for outpatient and inpatient care, as well as increased ambulance volumes. This, in addition to our normal seasonal increase for the winter months, is creating efficiency and flow concerns across the enterprise. This compounds recruitment needs for additional staffing to support physicians and address new challenging throughput issues. We do not go on diversion and diversion would serve no real purpose, as our next-closest hospital 35 miles from us.