Computer affinity leads to new job for admit director
She wasn’t looking for a new job, but when Loretta Scott, admissions director at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Augusta, GA, saw the job posting for a systems analyst position in the hospital’s information systems (IS) department, the timing seemed right. Scott decided to seize the opportunity.
Although the systems analyst job was tech-nically a step down in the hospital’s chain of command, Scott says she craved the challenges and mental stimulation it represented. After serving as admissions director for the past six years, overseeing the insurance verification, day surgery registration, and outpatient (which includes admissions, emergency department, and bed control functions) departments, she was familiar with every facet of that position and ready for a change.
"I really just love working on computer systems," she explains. "I have re-engineered the [admitting] department from one end to the other, and I was ready for a new challenge. Information systems is an ever-changing field, so I’ll be able to grow, and I still will be working very closely with admissions."
Initially focusing on information systems in college, Scott later changed direction and earned a business administration degree with a concentration in management. But in her role as admissions director, she found herself drawing constantly on her affinity for computers.
"Over the years I’ve worked closely with the programmer and have made changes in the ADT system that have helped other departments as well, because ADT touches all the other departments," Scott notes. Among the innovations she made were the following:
• streamlined registration screens based on patient type, so registrars see only what they need to fill in;
• created reports to perform these functions: identify managed care patients needing authorization numbers, identify inpatients who require precertification or benefits verification, print a list of patients in observation status who will need to be discharged or have their status changed to inpatient;
• piloted on-line reports, eliminating two full cabinets of hard-copy reports and training staff on how to use and retrieve on-line information. These include discharge reports and census activity reports, among others.
In her new position, which she assumed Dec. 1, Scott will prepare specialty reports that cross over admissions and patient accounting. If, for example, admitters want to know how many admissions there were on a certain date in a certain financial class, she’ll find the answer. "They’ll give me the criteria; I’ll write the report," she explains.
In her new position, she reports to the same vice president as she did in her admitting job, but she’ll report directly to the hospital’s information systems director.
Despite the current industry propensity for eliminating director of admitting positions and her own observation that the trend is moving toward putting nurses in charge of access departments, Scott says she never felt her old job was in any danger. In fact, her understanding is that a new admissions director will be hired to replace her.
Her motivation for the career change, she says, and her advice to her colleagues, is simply that change is good. "Anybody can get stagnant if they do the same thing too long."
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