Yuting Zhu, COL ’25, Shanghai, China
This summer I had to opportunity to work as a Performance improvement intern at Fox Chase Cancer Center, one of the oldest US cancer hospitals designated by National Cancer Institute. As an intern in a department that doesn’t work directly with patients, I was nonetheless lucky enough to experience the administrative, management, and clinical parts of the hospital.
With the extensive support from my supervisor and colleagues, I worked on multiple projects aiming to improve the quality of care and prepare the hospital for national accreditation programs. For example, to ensure that the nurse and pharmacy teams are aware of the programs’ safety requirements for IV chemotherapies and intrathecal medicines, my supervisor and I worked on assessment interviews and education materials. Regarding quality of care, I worked on ongoing projects of visualizing data of infections and patient satisfaction, alongside new initiatives of tracking clinical pathways that patients undergo in seeking care and improving clinical efficiency by analyzing the results. In working on these projects, I was able to collaborate with many staff outside the department, from nurses to physicians to IT consultants.
During this process, I came across many staff outside the department, from infection control and service line colleagues to nurses, physicians, social workers, community health workers, and even IT consultants that work at the backstage of electronic medical records. In my conversations and shadowing experiences with them, I pieced together my understandings of how the hospital runs, its strength and challenges. My exploration of the healthcare organization has not concluded yet, as I continue to involve in the new initiatives and start conversations with more staff and leadership.
This internship experience has been a great learning opportunity for me to understand firsthand one of the most expensive industries in the U.S. The intricacies continue to fascinate me, but more importantly, the passion that workers bring into the workplace and their dedication to helping patients has been one of the most fulfilling things I’ve seen and resonates with the very reason why I took this internship in the first place.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2023 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they spent their summer. You can read the entire series here
