Week 5- Personal Contribution

During week 5, I felt I had made significant progress towards making an impact on my team. I was tasked with creating a “Perioperative Patient Activity Data” summary deck. At first, I had no idea what a summary deck would consist of nor how I would use the data for it. I made sure to be vocal about this by asking for examples. The simple ask of examples seemed small but was crucial to my personal contribution and success. My team provided me an old client deck of periop activity. It outlined what specific summaries I would need to create and potential paths to visualize this data. From there, I had a first pass at analyzing the periop data for four facilities. I was able to capture what are the discrepancies for these four and critically think what would be the best way to capture this information. After playing around with the excel file, I understood that two of the facilities had both inpatient and outpatient care and two strictly had outpatient care with a 9-5 operating hours. This piece of information was important because specific patient types were categorized as inpatient or outpatient, but the file itself was not organized for these purposes. By calling this out, I was able to bring attention to it and with assistance create an inpatient vs outpatient filter for the data file. This filter was crucial for my summaries as I looked at periop case activity for each site by its inpatient or outpatient status. After this important call-out, I was able to create 35 slides looking at the various lenses to help our teams’ analysis. Some of these summaries included “Volume by Service Line”, “Volume by Service & Patient Type”, “Volume by Scheduled Room”, and “Volume by Scheduled and Patient Type”. What made this task challenging was I had to do it for each facility– so four times. However, I am really appreciated of this task because it directly accomplished my goal of familiarizing myself with hospital data. I was able to look at a raw data set, clean it up, add additional filters, then create pivot tables of what “lens” I’m looking at, then translate the information in a slide table or graph.

A way I used my critical thinking skills was by looking beyond the example I was given to make improvements. For instance, the data file had time lengths for each phase of the periop process. I then decided it would be helpful to compare service lines by their average phase times in a slide. This information was not a previous summary that was done but was confirmed to be helpful by my manager and team.

I did feel appreciated by my team for this big task and it helped guide conversations of OR data validation with the client. We were able to identify some discrepancies and my manager looked to me to find where in the data this is, to pull out and show to the client. Since the heavy work of this task was already completed, it was easy to locate the discrepancies and I pulled out the information in a new deck for my manager to share with the client. This OR data validation and summary is just one large piece of the larger puzzle but it felt great to make impact and elevate work off my team with this assignment.