I work for a hospital system with 15 facilities throughout Indiana. The health care system is comprised of a conglomeration of both academic and community based hospitals along with out-patient diagnostic facilities. My day is filled with data, data, and more data. My team includes 18 employees who coordinate efforts to improve performance in 15 national databases/registries. Twelve of the 15 national databases are centered on the cardiovascular patient at seven facilities throughout the organization. We prioritize our efforts on quality measures that impact on the organization and the patient we serve.

In my role, I work closely with physician and cardiovascular operational and administrative leaders throughout the Indiana University Health system. I may spend my day organizing and facilitating groups to standardize documentation efforts in the cath lab to support physician structured reporting, consolidate order sets to optimize organizational performance for quality measures, and update teams on current performance. In my role, administrative duties include contract consolidation, invoice processing, registry maintenance, people management, assessing new registries for participation, monitoring external changes for internal opportunities and developing operational and quality enhancement strategy.

In recent years, the role of quality improvement and metric monitoring continue to grow and impact organizations in payer programs, as well as through public reporting. I enjoy the ability to work with diverse operational and clinical teams to create processes and products to provide more efficient cardiovascular care. As each facility has varying resources and cultures, it is an exciting challenge to learn and develop comprehensive solutions while achieving the same organizational goal.

This article was authored by Andrea Price, MS, RCIS, CCA, the executive program director of cardiovascular specialty registries and process improvement at Indiana University Health.