Hello, everyone, and welcome to another exciting episode of Consensus podcast. This episode is part of the best in class series showcasing the SeaTac Connect twenty twenty three winners. I'm your host, Gabrielle, and in a moment, we're gonna speak with Alina Easley, lead MST SensiTrack coordinator and winner of the Changemaker award at SeaTac Connect twenty twenty three. This award is given to an educator who uses unique training methods to support their organizations. Alina took it upon herself to grow how her team uses their SensiTrak platform. It went from being a barely used burden to an integral tool that assists them in every day in their mission to provide safe patient care. She implemented case tracking, tray weights, and integration with other equipment, including the biological incubators. Alina also gives her team monthly in services on specific SensaTrac features that her team can use to better perform their sterile processing duties. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast, Alina. Thank you for having me. To start off, let's give our audience a little bit of your background. So just give us a name, title, and what it is you do in the industry. My name is Alina Easley. I am the SensorTract coordinator, just to keep it short, for Central Texas VA as well as Austin Outpatient Clinic. My sole responsibility is the functionality of SensorTract at our facilities as well as serving as the subject matter expert for SensiTrak. Any hardware issues or anything like that related to SensiTrak, I am responsible for that. So as a subject matter expert as well as educator, what kind of difficulties have you had to face, in terms of of things brought to you in education deployment? What have just been some of the challenges or difficulties? So a lot of the difficulties that I have is when I implement staff, they're not really receptive to change. A lot of times, they are comfortable where we are with utilizing the program at that particular time. So as an educator, if I am doing a new implementation, sometimes I may receive some pushback. So I just have to continue to educate and do the why behind where why we're doing this, explain to them that this is gonna make us more effective. If we have any hardware issues or things of that sort, I'm responsible for getting those together as well. So, yeah, as an educator, it's always very difficult to implement new things because, like I said, staff is not always receptive to change. And in terms of building your educator profile, what resources have you utilized to help you, just develop as an educator for your team? So one thing that I did was I went to CTEC in two thousand and nineteen. I've met a lot of people there. I did a lot of networking, so they helped me out grow as an educator as well as I am in a SysTrack group with a a bunch of coordinators. If there's any questions that I may have, I also have the help desk. I have my client manager, trainers that have come on to our site. If I have any questions, I could reach out to them as well. I also did the manager course. So all of those tools have helped me be able to grow as a sister track coordinator. Well, walk us through your thought process when you decided that you wanted to shake things up and start implementing changes within your department. So as a sister track coordinator, when I first took this position, what I saw was a lot of weak spots that we had. We was doing a lot of paper documentation. So we have a database, so why not use it to its full capability? That was my thought process when we were implementing new things of how can we streamline this data. Let's make it easier for ourselves. Let's get away from that paper, and let's streamline stuff. So that's what I look at. I also look at, is it gonna be conducive to our workflow? Is it gonna help us? Those are the aspects that I look at before making any type of changes. Well, did you face any kind of pushback, or did you have ample collaboration? What was the atmosphere, within your department in terms of assistance in implementing this change? So for instance, our competency module, we just implemented that maybe a month ago. With that, I did have collaboration from the education team. They helped me get that data into the system and putting those technicians' dates from their books when they were actually trained off on their competencies. So there's various times that I collaborate with various people in our department. We also do have a quality assurance coordinator as well. When we put the weights in the system, she did collaborate with me, and we worked as a team to get that done. So there's numerous times where I have a lot of help with implementations. Well, now that you've gotten over the hard part, which is the initial change, what are some of your staff's favorite features that they found through using a census track, or that you've been able to show them and they they enjoyed? So one thing that the staff rant and rave about is the quality feedback model. They absolutely love that. If you can see the exception reports that we get every day coming in with staff, you know, putting in that feedback. They also like the message module because it's very quick and efficient for us to get that message pop up on our screen, and we can communicate quickly within the department. They also like being able to scan at the instrument level. Some of our newer staff, they may not necessarily know their instruments, but that does help them be able to learn their instrumentation. We also have competencies tied to our trays. So for instance, our stainless steel instruments, they can scan a stainless steel tray and that competency display for them. So just various things that the staff, they're they're awesome. They they love love And then on that note, what are your personal favorite features? I like the reporting module. My job is very analytical, so reports really help me get by day to day. I have reports that are utilized at the VISTA level for our service chief. I have reports set up for just about everybody in in our department. So, yeah, the reporting module is my favorite one. Absolutely. Well, how do you prepare yourself, in to in service your teams on various SensiTrak modules or procedures? So what I do is I educate myself first. I run through numerous demos because you never wanna get up there and you don't know what you're talking about. So I make sure that I'm, fully prepared when I'm educating staff that I can be able to answer any questions or concerns related to this particular module. Like I said, I I really educate myself on that module prior to implementation, and I actually tell them why this would be beneficial to our department. Well, your initiative is really inspiring, Alina, and we wanna thank you for talking to us today and coming on the podcast. I guess, as we start to close-up here, do you have any last bits of advice, for maybe facilities who want to utilize, more of their SensaTract program, but just don't quite know where to start or, what's even capable? What I would say is reach out to your client manager. Your client manager can help you out. Our business reviews really helped me mold to be to where we are today. It shows you your weak spots, and it helps you grow as a facility, as well as reach out to knowledgeable coordinators that may be in your area. Utilize that CISA TRAK VA group. Like I said, there's numerous people in there that can help you and aid you. You can start with the small stuff first and then just grow. Absolutely. Well, that wraps up the conversation for today. So thank you, Alina, for joining us on today's podcast episode of Consensus. It was a pleasure to have you on. And as always, if you wanna learn more, please visit census dot com and look for this podcast wherever it is you get your podcasts at. I've been your host, Gabrielle. Thanks for tuning in.
