Author: Dina

Today was our final day. We started off by giving our presentation on how the company could effectively use applications like Teams and gave examples of how channels could be organized. We ended the presentation with a long Q&A, and hopefully, our suggestions helped to give the company a good overview of how Teams works. After that, we had a brief presentation on how the results of our email campaign went, and finally, we got to hear a presentation on how the company tracks its finances and they demonstrated some scenarios with made-up numbers. It was very interesting to see how these things are tracked, and we learned a lot about how many factors go into financial decisions in a company, especially when it’s a smaller business.

Today we started with a meeting where we learned about the behind-the-scenes aspect of business, and how a website is optimized to both contain accurate content but also have enough key search terms that it will show up early on Google. After that, we met one more time with our business development group to finalize the email that we were going to get to send out to Vascular Wellness’s potential partners in West Virginia. We gathered emails and sent the campaign out, and we will get to check the results tomorrow to see who opened the email and who clicked on the link to go to the website.

 

Today, Lance and I got to go to a hospital in Cape Fear and shadow the vascular access team that was stationed there. We got to watch 2 midlines, 1 PICC, and 1 IJ which was super cool to watch. We also got to shadow one of the nurses, and she showed us some of the critical thinking that she does every day.

For example, one of the patients we looked at was a little overdue for a dressing change, but her skin was so fragile that taking off the dressing would have taken some of the skin with it. The nurse we were shadowing met with the nurse assigned to the patient, and we got to listen in on their conversation on what to do. It was very interesting to listen to how they came to an answer, and the nurses were quick to explain any jargon we didn’t understand.

Today we once again met with the head of Business Development/sales to work on our marketing email and gather information about hospitals. We got some helpful feedback – the body for our email was great, while the subject line needed some improvement. We learned about how to improve our email and came up with a better subject line for it. Tonight, we are going to finish up our email and start exploring Zoho to learn about the software that they use for marketing.

Today started with our WEP team gathering together to do some of the projects that were assigned to us. This included creating a presentation on how Vascular Wellness could best implement Teams and OneNote to improve company efficiency, as well as working on a marketing project that involved drafting an email to be sent out to many hospitals and gathering a list of hospitals that met the criteria of what the company was looking for.

After that, we met with the head of Business Development/Sales to review our work. He gave us some pointers on how to better structure our email, and advice on which sections of the email to keep and which to just move to a different place. Overall, it was very helpful and interesting, and now we will revise our email and gather more information on the hospitals we were looking at, including gathering the percent occupancy and contact info of some executives such as the CNO/CMO (chief nursing officer/chief medical officer).

Here is an example of the kind of information we have gathered so far, as well as places where we will add more info after our meeting:

This morning, we started out with a zoom call going over one of the longer-term projects we would be doing over the course of the internship. After separating so that we could get started on it, we joined a call with the head of business development and sales to go over another project that we would be doing, which involved creating an email marketing campaign for the company.

After that, I separated from the group so I could shadow one of the nurses as she did some procedures at a skilled care facility in a Durham hospital. While at the facility, I was able to watch the nurse do both a midline and a PIV, and I even got to use the ultrasound machine to identify the vein, artery, and nerve bundles. She walked me through the procedures that she performed, and I was able to learn a lot about not just the procedures themselves, but also the nursing profession as a whole!

I was unable to include photos of going to the hospital for obvious reasons, but I did include a helpful diagram to explain the different procedures that the nurse does on a day-to-day basis! I got to watch her do the midline today.

This morning, we started by going over the basics of the company and learning about what the different parts do (clinical, marketing, business development/sales, and administration). We got a brief overview of what the company does, and what reasons a hospital would want to hire them.

After a quick break for lunch, we went into more specifics of the business and talked about what we would want to do for the next two weeks. We learned about the cycle of buying/selling and an overview of PICC lines, midlines, and other methods of vascular access. Tomorrow morning we will begin working on projects and potentially a marketing campaign, and later this week we will have the opportunity to attend a training session for some of the new nurses.