Humans of St. Charles - Paulina

“There were definitely a lot of people involved in this, and it just feels good knowing that I have such great colleagues to work with who were all willing to go above and beyond to learn what we were doing and understand the goal and help us improve. It’s nice to see that we can come together to make a more efficient process that will benefit the health system and, ultimately, our patients.”

Paulina, a coordinator on the Bend Ortho/Neuro floor who recently collaborated with several groups across the health system – including the Lean Improvement Office, Epic analysts, Wound Care nurses, the OR team, Environmental Services, Clinical Informatics, unit secretaries and more – to improve how the health system manages and tracks the use of rental wound vacuum-assisted closure (VAC) machines. Previously, Paulina was the only caregiver managing and tracking the machines, an extremely manual and time-consuming process. By incorporating Epic technology and working together to improve processes, the team was able to cut Paulina’s management time by half and increase the availability of VACs for patients.