Summer 2014 Internship – Project HOME
This past summer I had the pleasure of interning for Project HOME’s St. Elizabeth’s Wellness Center from June to the end of August. When I first mentioned to people that I worked for Project HOME, most people didn’t know that HOME is actually an acronym: Housing, Opportunities, Medical, and Education. Project HOME celebrated its 25 anniversary this year. “The mission of the Project HOME community is to empower adults, children, and families to break the cycle of homelessness and poverty, to alleviate the underlying causes of poverty, and to enable all of us to attain our fullest potential as individuals and as members of the broader society. We strive to create a safe and respectful environment where we support each other in our struggles for self-esteem, recovery, and the confidence to move toward self-actualization.”
When I started my internship I found out that Project HOME was opening a new wellness center, Stephen Klein Wellness Center, at the beginning of 2015 that will replace its current wellness center, St. Elizabeth’s Wellness Center. The current wellness center offers family medicine, pediatrics and behavioral health services. When the Stephen Klein Wellness Center opens, it house more services such as dental, OB/GYN, a pharmacy and a YMCA gym.
Job Description:
My official title was Health Services IT Intern. My primary focus for the Summer was abstracting and scanning over 200 patient charts and adding it to St. Elizabeth’s Wellness Center’s new health information system, specifically the electronic health record (EHR), that was implemented back in March 2014. The type of data I was abstracting was past medical history, immunizations, current diagnosis, medications and family medical history. Throughout the Summer, I was involved in several other IT related tasks such as template modification, training, and developing scanning/paper workflow. It was very challenging learning a whole new information system. One challenging task I took upon myself this summer was to customize the Orders sets to fit the needs of the wellness center. This meant reading through manuals to figure how I could do this. The manuals were vague and I had to learn how to use the add content to the service library that populates into the Orders sets. After learning how it was pulling information, I asked the Clinical Director what the most common office medications, office labs, diagnosis, and procedures were so I could add those items to the service library. Then, I went through the individual Order set and add the 6 most common medications, labs, etc., to each of those categories. In the middle of the Summer, the wellness center went live with the EHR, which meant providers had to document their progress notes in the EHR only. During this time, I had to be available to train and assist providers with documentation and this helped expand my knowledge of the EHR. Overall, I learned a lot from my experience at Project HOME. I will continue to intern at St. Elizabeth’s Wellness Center for the Fall 2014 semester.
How it relates to my education:
Out of the four MIS courses I have taken so far, this internship relates most to Digital Design and Innovation. In this MIS course, I learned how to be a Business Analyst (BA) and assumed that role by providing a product to a real life client. I assumed the role as a BA in my internship by interviewing “clients/subject matter experts” (providers and medical assistants) and taking direction from my “project sponsor” (Clinical Director) and my “project manager” (my supervisor). After interviewing I modified the EHR to match the needs of my “clients” and the wellness center as a whole. There are two differences between my class and my internship. When I was taking the class, I was on a team and we had to create a product for our “client”. But, during my internship, I only worked with my “project manager” and Project HOME already choose the software, NextGen. It was then my job to analyze the business so the software could become a better fit.