Staff Award for Excellence - Tawny Czilok

Tawny Czilok

Alex, Bauer, and Tawny

Clinical Information Analyst, Division of Hospital Medicine

Nominators, Elizabeth McLaughlin and Dr. Vineet Chopra: "Tawny is most deserving of this award as she is a strong leader, team player, advocate for our team and department, and trailblazer. Tawny not only carried our team through this COVID-19 pandemic but also enhanced our work with her strong work performance and ability to lead others to accomplish seemingly impossible tasks. The Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Hospital Medicine, and the Michigan Hospital Medicine Safety (HMS) Consortium is lucky to have Tawny's knowledge, skill, and leadership." 

     

Work Performance

Tawny demonstrates exemplary work performance in her daily work. When Tawny is given a task she ensures she understands the task, seeks clarifying questions and completes the task in a timely manner. Tawny is known on our team for being a "closer" and I know the most complex of tasks will be completed with her at the helm. In March 2020, our team developed a registry titled "Mi-COVID19" to track care and outcomes for hospitalized patients with COVID19 across 40+ hospitals in Michigan. Tawny was integral to this registry launch and continued maintenance to this day. Using her experience and education as a both a nurse and a masters in health information, Tawny led a herculean effort working with our physician partners, leaders in the School of Information, data analysts, etc. Please see this website for a more thorough description of this effort: (https://www.si.umich.edu/about-umsi/news/umsi-alumni-team-groundbreaking...) Another example of Tawny's exemplary work is her efforts to ensure data integrity across the 63 hospitals that are part of our collaborative. Tawny worked alongside our lead data analyst to create a "data check" where individuals at each hospital utilize to identify errors in real time. Data integrity is paramount and Tawny identified these checks using her clinical knowledge and experience with data collection methods. Tawny is very skilled at leading a project and working with a team of individuals. She is an exceptional team player and her exemplary work is a direct reflection of her skill at being able to coordinate and manage a large task with multiple players involved.

Leadership

Tawny is a natural leader. Over the last several years she has been managing 3-4 staff members. I have watched her grow into a superb leader who cares about her staff and the integrity of the program. She is always seeking out professional development opportunities to grow in her role. Recently, Tawny completed the high reliability training for leaders. As we were recently discussing how to handle a challenging situation, she brought to me the Performance Management Decision Guide that she had learned during her training. We used the decision guide to help navigate our decision process. This example showed me that Tawny is using the resources she learned and applying those resources to her daily work. It also shows her exemplary leadership skills in ensuring that our organization is upholding the high standards we are known for.
 
Additionally, over the last year Tawny has brought on 2 new staff members. The onboarding process for this role is quite intensive. Tawny single handedly developed a comprehensive level based onboarding process to ensure proper onboarding and training of these new staff members. She created numerous guidelines/documents her staff to refer to when completing tasks to ensure proprer training and consistency. Tawny is quick to give positive feedback to her staff and also constructive feedback when necessary. She is always willing to help her staff which shows her exemplary leadership skills. Recently, one of her staff members was in charge of a very large project launch. Due to some delays outside of our control, a large amount of tasks were to be completed in a very short period of time. Tawny worked with her staff member and delegated tasks, including several to herself, to ensure the work was completed and her staff member was supported. A true leader recognizes when a staff member needs support and is there to back them up when needed. This is Tawny!

Customer Service

Tawny is always focused on customer service. In our area of work, we have several customers. These include our member hospitals, our funder, and our physician leads/experts. I will provide an example of Tawny's excellent customer service for each of these 3 customers:

  • Member Hospitals- We provide reports to our member hospitals that show their hospital specific performance related to specific quality metrics. Hospitals then use this data to inform their hospital specific quality improvement work. Tawny worked in partnership with our data analytics team to develop a dashboard report that was easy to read, comprehensive and provided actionable information. In every decision she made her goal was to ensure that the sites had exactly what they needed to inform their work. Additionally, Tawny worked to ensure the data was accurate and proper quality checks were put in place to prevent current and future errors.
  • Funder- We are funded by BCBSM as a part of the Value Partnerships Program. A key part of our work is to showcase our work to BCBSM related to the value of our initiatives. Tawny has superb skills in data visualization and graphic design. To showcase how our work has spread across the US and the globally Tawny created a map to visually depict the dissemination of our work that was then shared with BCBSM. 
  • Physician leads/experts- Tawny has been the primary administrative lead for one of our initiatives and works with 2 physician experts (Dr. Tejal Gandhi and Dr. Lindsay Petty) to accomplish initiative deliverables and advance the initiative. Tawny is always prepared to run the weekly meetings and ensures all staff are properly prepared to present relevant materials. She has been working with the physicians to create and update a toolkit that will be distributed to our member hospitals. She attended the ID Week this past Fall of 2020 to obtain additional tools and ideas to add to this toolkit. Dr. Tejal Gandhi and Dr. Lindsay Petty have voiced strong appreciation for the work Tawny puts forth and feel a great sense of confidence with her administratively running the initiative.

Process Improvement

Tawny is always looking at ways to improve processes and how operations work. During our 1:1 meetings, Tawny is always bringing forward ideas for how we can improve the way we do our day to day business. For example, this past year Tawny hired a new staff member to her team. During the hiring process there were a few hiccups in terms of the timing of communications from HR and messaing from her as the hiring manager. Tawny worked with our HR partners to establish a process to improve these lines of communication going forward. Tawny is laser focused on ensuring that processes are streamlined, functional, and well though out. Additionally, during the COVID-19 pandemic our work changed to all virtual. This includes audits that were normally conducted in person at our 63 hospitals across Michigan. Seemingly overnight, Tawny modified the entire auditing process to virtual and led her team of nurses through this intense new process. This included working with IT, data security, individual hospital quality departments, etc. This is just one of few examples of how Tawny modified, and improved, our processes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.