Profile: Ambulatory Surgery and Medical Procedures Center Operations and Activation Planning Team
Teamwork makes a major difference at ASMPC
“Each building project is like a new baby,” says Kate Jones, UH Capital Projects coordinator. “There’s conception; that’s the original idea. Gestation is the construction and planning-for-activation phase. Then, all of a sudden, there it is: the new building—your new baby.”
Jones has worked on UH project activation teams for 15 years, most recently for the East Ann Arbor Ambulatory Surgery and Medical Procedures Center. Anne Ferris, project coordinator, led the Operations and Activation Planning Team, which included: Sheri Dufek, R.N., former associate hospital administrator and director of nursing, UH operating rooms; Virginia Walter, M.S., R.N., C.G.R.N., internal medicine director of outpatient services; Deborah Laubach, Kathy Mariou and Rudi Rabe, who joined the team as they were hired for key positions in the Center; and medical directors Leslie Aldrich, M.D. (Medical Procedures Center), and Norah Naughton, M.D. (Ambulatory Surgery Center).
“Both medical directors had a vision of a site where we would do things in a better, more cost-effective and patient-friendly way,” Ferris says. “That set the tone.”
“Norah and I worked very hard on taking the hassle out of ambulatory care: the waiting, the duplication of effort and the overlap of services,” says Aldrich. “The two sides of our Center— Medical Procedures and Ambulatory Surgery—perform very different procedures, yet we have a similar patient flow model and we share some of the same materials. Wherever we could, we combined efforts. We wanted our East Ann Arbor Center to be efficient without feeling like an assembly line. We wanted to retain the Health System’s goals of patient-centered and family-friendly care.”
The team relied on input from staff at all levels—physicians, nurses, MCIT staff and others—to ensure creation of a health care center where well-designed processes support and even enhance compassionate care.
“We involved the people who make the stretchers—everyone’s perspective was important,” says Aldrich.
“When setting up a building, there are a lot of things to take into consideration, everything from financial and billing structures, to clinical operations, to the mail,” says Jones.
Despite the hundreds of details, inevitable stress and deadlines, the team kept a sense of humor. And when the facility opened April 17, Ferris called it “the most fun I’d ever had on a project. I was sorry to see it end.”
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