As Rush University Medical Center’s new chief nursing officer, Deana Sievert, DNP, RN, is zeroing in on a challenge that many growing health systems face: how to unify nursing practice across an expanding enterprise without sacrificing clarity, efficiency or quality.
Dr. Sievert, who stepped into the role in November, has been tasked with creating what she called “one Rush nursing” — a systemwide effort to align nursing practice and operations across the academic health system’s three hospitals and growing ambulatory footprint.
“One of the most exciting things I’ve been asked to do is to create “One Rush Nursing,” which is really about systematizing what Rush nursing does today,” she said in an interview with Becker’s. “We have three hospitals and a large ambulatory footprint and in reality, and we’ve not worked as a true system before.”
Central to that work is developing Rush’s first strategic plan for nursing, which will cover everything from job descriptions and onboarding processes to career development pathways.
The goal in creating and implementing the plan is to reduce variation and clarify expectations across care settings, which will ultimately strengthen retention and support more consistent quality outcomes across the system, according to Dr. Sievert.
This work is especially timely in today’s healthcare environment, as more care shifts to outpatient settings and team-based care models evolve. Against that backdrop, Dr. Sievert said tighter enterprise alignment and clearer role definition are increasingly important.
“Where we’ll spend a lot of our time is around role clarity for our staff,” Dr. Sievert said. “There are a lot of grey lines right now. If you don’t have that strong role clarity and everyone having a clear understanding of what their lanes are, then unfortunately things can be missed and our patients are on the end of that.”
Standardization, Dr. Sievert said, is not just an internal workforce initiative. In outpatient clinics, clearer role delineation and streamlined workflows can directly affect operational efficiency and patient access.
“When you start to get those things right, the patient flow and access improvements across our ambulatory footprint just follows that,” she said.
The enterprise approach also extends to professional growth. As part of the strategic work, Dr. Sievert is modernizing Rush’s clinical ladder program to better reflect evolving care delivery models and ensure advancement pathways are consistent across the system. Leaders are also exploring the creation of a career coach role to support early-career nurses and provide clearer visibility into long-term growth opportunities within the organization.
“Turnover is highest within the first three to five years, so we’ve only got a few years to really engrain new team members and show them what is available within our system,” she said.
Nurse onboarding is another area under review. Dr. Sievert said the system is rethinking traditional, lecture-heavy education in favor of shorter, more targeted learning modules designed to accelerate clinical competency.
“Are we still doing the four-hour didactic lecture, or can we shift to those micro-learnings, those short bursts of education, and close that knowledge gap much more quickly?” she said.
Ultimately, Dr. Sievert said her long-term vision is to build a cohesive nursing enterprise that operates with shared standards and clear accountability across settings — an approach she said will drive continued improvements in patient care and staff engagement.
