Lidia Turrubiartes is a December 2014 graduate of the SBMI Master's in Health Informatics program. Turrubiartes completed her practicum at Harris Health System, which is a community-owned healthcare system for Harris County. Before presenting her final findings at the end of her practicum tenure, Turrubiartes applied for and was offered a full-time role at Harris Health. "My practicum project materialized into a permanent role with Harris Health System and I am thankful for that opportunity," notes Turrubiartes.
During her practicum participation at Harris Health, Turrubiartes was able to evaluate clinical quality measures (CQM) with the goal of tracking potential improvements made because of Harris Health's meaningful use (MU) objectives. In all, Turrubiartes was able to see improvements in the quality of health care for items like median arrival to departure time for emergency department patients and care coordination for patients assessed for rehabilitation. The results of her findings were detailed in her state of the science titled "Analysis of Clinical Quality Measures to Assess Improvement from Meaningful Use." As Turrubiartes indicated, "I utilized the skill set I acquired while taking my SBMI courses and turned that into an ability to offer tangible results for the team at Harris Health."
In her full-time role at Harris Health, Turrubiartes will be a software engineer who focuses on developing reports for hospital needs based on report requests created by users like nurses, doctors, administrators and researchers. This will entail developing and troubleshooting reports, views, and/or queries, researching questions about data and report reconciliation using SQL tools and maintaining version histories of reports, views, and other reporting items. Turrubiartes stated that "the largest portion of my role is to ensure that the users report needs are met via Epic." In addition, Turrubiartes will continue working on Meaningful Use reporting and the implementation of SlicerDicer, an Epic-integrated reporting tool for clinicians.
If Turrubiartes could share advice with future or current SBMI students, she stated that "students should take full advantage of their practicum projects." Turrubiartes continued by suggesting that "engulfing yourself in the experience and exploring how you can apply your health informatics knowledge in real-world practices is invaluable.”