Richard Watters, Ph.D., R.N., center, talks with attendees at the poster session for the Fundamentals of Quality Improvement in Healthcare elective. (photo by Daniel Dubois)
Grad students explore health care quality issues
Students of the Fundamentals of Quality Improvement in Healthcare, an interdisciplinary elective jointly run by the School of Nursing, School of Medicine and the Owen Graduate School of Management, recently held a poster session to display a semester’s worth of work, discuss the findings with faculty and have student voters choose the top three posters.
Ten different student teams presented their posters detailing quality improvement projects.
The winning project was “Outpatient Pediatrics: A Look at Time Spent During Patient Visits,” by students Nida Bajwa, William Davis, Caroline Hale, Catherine Hurley, Daniel Pomerantz and Logan Thompson.
Second place went to “Adult Outpatient: Smoking Cessation, Screening and Prevention,” by Robert Havens, Sarah Lauderdale, Tulsi Roy, Sina Salehi Omran and Kalen Stanton.
Third place was claimed by “Improving the Accuracy of Patient Medication Lists in the Vanderbilt Interventional Pain Clinic,” by Dhruv Chopra, Monica da Silva, Heather Hodnett, Travis Ladner and Jamie Rathermel.
Faculty advisors representing the three schools are Richard Watters, Ph.D., R.N., clinical associate professor of Nursing; Tom Christenbery, Ph.D., assistant professor of Nursing; Terri Crutcher, MSN, assistant professor of Clinical Nursing; Rangaraj Ramanujam, Ph.D., associate professor of Management (Organizational Studies); and Jacob Hathaway, M.D., assistant professor of Medicine.
The student-managed course, which is part of the Vanderbilt Healthcare Improvement Group, was featured last year in the influential Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s annual report.