Staff Award for Excellence - Sheryl Fielding

Sheryl Fielding

Clinical Info Analyst Lead - Division of Cardiovascular Medicine

Nominator, Annemarie Forrest-  "Sheryl is an exemplary team member. She cares deeply about her work and her colleagues. That sense of caring leads to unparalleled commitment to excellence and integrity and she is an invaluable asset to MISHC, BMC2, as well as to national TVT leadership. Sheryl has graciously handled change in workflow, management, and overall team membership at BMC2 in the last year and will be a critical player in expanding the scope of our work in the years to come." 

Work Performance

Sheryl Fielding has demonstrated exemplary work performance throughout her career at Michigan Medicine. After using her expertise as a registered nurse in the catheterization lab and operating rooms, Sheryl joined the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan Cardiovascular Consortium (BMC2) Coordinating Center as a Clinical Quality Improvement Lead in 2010. Sheryl acts as the lead nurse educator for the Michigan Structural Heart Consortium (formerly Michigan TAVR), and supports other BMC2 projects focused on percutaneous coronary intervention and vascular surgery. In her role she works closely with her colleagues at BMC2, collaborates with peers at the Michigan Society of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery Quality Collaborative (MSTCVS) and the National STS/ACC NCDR TVT Registry, and supports structural heart physicians and coordinators, hospital system administrators, and registry coordinators across the State of Michigan by conducting chart reviews and site visits, developing reports and resources, and facilitating educational meetings to drive quality improvement.

Leadership

Sheryl has been instrumental in making Michigan a US leader in structural heart care quality improvement. She takes the personal initiative to work closely with national leaders to provide constructive feedback from Michigan sites regarding the national registry data collection forms, definitions, and reports. In 2021 she identified a significant information technology issue with the national registry, coordinated hospitals in Michigan to describe the problem to national leaders, and prompted a change that will improve the experience of registry participants across the US. She also served on a national review and feedback group for a recent national database update and the 2020 TVT Quality Summit Virtual Curriculum Planning Workgroup.
 
Sheryl also demonstrates leadership among her peers in the State of Michigan: she has coordinated work groups to develop best practice guidelines for the statewide quality consortium; she has collaborated on briefs describing the importance of recommended approaches to high quality data collection; and supported peer-reviewed publications informing state and national structural heart quality improvement efforts

Customer Service

Sheryl’s primary role is to support hospitals across the State of Michigan conducting structural heart procedures in their quality improvement efforts (data collection, QI projects). She emphasizes caring and teamwork during site visits, she is always available to her customers to answer questions and provide feedback. She connects hospitals with one another who can learn from each others’ successes and challenges. She has even worked closely with hospitals to support the development of their programs, prior to being eligible to be a consortium member.

Our national registry partner recently underwent a version update. Sheryl spent countless hours updating associated MISHC training resources and revising reports and report dictionaries, and has taken the initiative to hold a series of statewide educational meetings to prepare our members for success with the national change.

Process Improvement

Sheryl recognized a gap in service that MISHC provides to structural heart teams across Michigan, and worked to fill that by creating a new working group for structural heart care coordinators and advance practice providers. Sheryl created a steering committee to identify work group goals and activities, facilitates quarterly educational and networking meetings for the group, and has supported efforts among this group to develop a best practice document and publication focused on preventing readmissions among the target patient population.