The Team: Lauren Ankeles, Maggie Draughon, Carolyn Schneider and Marine Graham
Hello from Boston Logan airport! Our bags are checked and we are ready for a two-week adventure in Hyderabad, India, working for LifeSpring Hospitals. Our trip is part of a course at MIT Sloan called GlobalHealth Lab. The course was designed to match healthcare providers in sub-saharan Africa and India with graduate students at MIT, with the goal of bringing new business principles and perspectives to the healthcare leaders, and an opportunity for the students to experience the challenges and rewards of providing healthcare in low resource settings.
Our host on the ground is Vijay Srinivas, the Head of Process Control for LifeSpring’s 12 hospitals. LifeSpring is a 7-year-old organization that provides affordable, no-frills maternity care with high standards of quality. In this for-profit model, they have delivered over 20,000 healthy babies in Hyderabad and have grown tremendously since the company founding. For the past 6-8 weeks, we have communicated with Vijay about our project and prepared some interim research – a compilation of studies and articles that relate to the project scope.
The purpose of our trip is to complete a time and motion study of a critical role at the hospital – the Clinical Nurse Manager (CNM). This type of role is new to the hospital and has little to no precedent in India.
The CNM is a nurse by training, but has been promoted to also be the manager of the hospital branch, responsible for facilities readiness, records, billing and expenses, procurement, customer satisfaction, staffing, etc. With her nursing credentials, she can also be an escalation point for clinical questions or she can step in as a nurse if there are a large number of deliveries in a given day. In fact, her list of duties is nearly 18 pages long.
Our question is – where does she spend her time and how does she prioritize among a seemingly overwhelming list of tasks? Is her current list of duties the optimal for delivering quality care and running a successful hospital? Does she have access to the right resources to have the best opportunity for success in this role?
We are so excited to get started! But for now, we will board the plane and get on our way!