Capstone Internship
Ascension St. Vincent
Overview: Currently, I am an intern at Ascension St. Vincent. This hospital system is committed to providing healthcare to those populations that may otherwise not have access to it. They are a faith-based organization and are dedicated to spiritually-centered care which will help improve and sustain the health of different communities. Most of their locations are located around or north of Indianapolis. I am working alongside their Population Health Program Manager who is mainly in charge of their bundled payment program.
Responsibilities: My main responsibility is to report COVID-19 data. Each morning I look at tables and spreadsheets of COVID-19 data that each Ascension St. Vincent hospital reports. I then input that data into a tracking sheet, which then eventually gets sent to the State for recordkeeping. In addition to this responsibility, I also regularly attend virtual meetings with my supervisor. These meetings cover a whole array of different subjects, and it has been interesting to see how the concepts I've learned in school are applied in the real world. I also help my supervisor out with smaller projects, such as reporting on discharges from the different hospitals, mailing out important documents to patients, etc.
Objectives:
Become more confident in my written and verbal communication within the professional setting
More thoroughly understand how partnerships between the hospital system and payers/outside organizations are conducted
Identify a functional setting that feels comfortable to me
I feel like I have progressed well towards meetings these goals. Since everything is virtual right now, I do not really have the chance to talk with other employees face-to-face, but I have definitely become more confident in writing emails to professionals. I frequently observe meetings where the hospital system is meeting and checking in with the different payers and facilities they contract with outside of the company. This has given me a sense of how connected everything within healthcare is and how each piece helps the other provide great quality care. As of right now, I do not feel I have found a functional setting that I would like to work in. I attribute this to the fact that everything is virtual, so I am unable to go around and see what the different employees do on a day-to-day basis.
Personal Development: During my internship, some skills/knowledge I acquired were:
Virtual meeting etiquette
Knowledge about different healthcare payment forms and services
Professional email writing
How to navigate certain electronic health records and data sources
Developed knowledge on quality control measures
As mentioned, since my internship is virtual, I feel like I haven't been able to obtain that face-to-face experience with professionals in this field. This is something I hope to develop and improve upon once in person work is available again.
Academic Connections: I've been able to apply many things that I've learned in the classroom to this experience. These include knowledge about:
Medicare/Medicaid
Commercial Insurance
Long-term Care
Bundled Payments
How quality is measured and why it is important
Data usage
Some courses that helped me apply all of this knowledge include:
Healthcare Delivery in the US
Health Systems Administration
Management of Health Service Organizations
Professionalism in the Healthcare Workplace
Chronic and Long-term Care Administration
These courses provided me with my backbone of knowledge. I was able to take what I learned from these courses and apply it to this internship. Without these courses, I wouldn't have been able to understand the basics behind these concepts. They really helped enhance my experience at Ascension.
Internship Introduction Video: https://youtu.be/Fj0pMY-nMhk