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