Coffee with COR — an interview with Adele Lolus, Commercial Operations & Finance Manager, Excel Medical.
Although Adele Lolus is the Commercial Operations and Finance Manager, that title simply does not do her role justice. Ms. Lolus graduated from the University of Florida with an Industrial and Systems Engineering degree and went on to become a certified Six Sigma Black Belt. Her career has been rooted in process improvement, change management and data analytics.
COR: What competency from your education and training do you believe you bring to the table that will benefit the healthcare environment?
Having worked in hospitals, I know how challenging it can be to figure out your priorities — whether you’re a clinician, an IT analyst, a clinical educator or a chief nursing officer. Excel Medical has been making and supporting great software and hardware for years. Using my project management, change management and process improvement background, I want to optimize:
- Workflows, access and use for the clinicians
- Technical implementation for the IT analyst
- Clinical deployment for the clinical educator
- Building the business case for the chief nursing officer
This will allow us all to prioritize getting vital data into the hands of our clinicians to help save patient lives.
COR: How does the vendor help fill the gap in ensuring that health technology implementations are adopted and continue to support patient safety?
First, vendors need to develop solutions that are easy to use for end users and have the fewest points of technical failure. If clinicians cannot depend on it and hospital technical resources cannot support it, customers will not use it.
Secondly, vendors need to treat their relationships with customers less as a transaction and more as a partnership — developing and maintaining relationships with both technical and clinical users. As part of that relationship, vendors need to:
- Define what success looks like from the customer’s point of view
- Be clear about their expectations of resources — roles, time, technical infrastructure — from the front end of a project
- Offer clinical training on an ongoing basis to handle clinician turnover
- Give their customers a way to track utilization; if the clinicians aren’t using it, why not?
COR: Why do you believe in the solutions your company has to offer?
Excel Medical’s ability to build real solutions to the problems that every hospital and health system has, and to do so quickly, has been incredible to be part of. I am a member of a team where each of us has a different background that contributes in different ways to build, deploy and support our solutions. I have seen our solutions making a difference in the lives of physicians, nurses, techs and patients with my own two eyes.
The COR perspective
Adele is a spirited and humble leader who possesses many innate skills and competencies. But the one that stands out among the rest is her ability to jump in and do anything necessary to advance the team.
Good leadership is always human. It takes time and energy. It is hard work. Which is why good leadership is so special when we find it.
Simon Sinek
