Leisa: Hello, I’m Leisa Holland-Nelson and welcome to another edition of Women Mean Business, where we’re going to take you up close and personal with extraordinary women doing extraordinary things. My guest today is Diane Scardino, Vice President of Operations for Texas Children’s Hospital. Diane, welcome to Women Mean Business.

Diane: Well thank you, Leisa. I’m glad to be here with you.

Leisa: I am thrilled to have you. As you know, I am a Texas Children’s advocate, having a new granddaughter born in the pavilion, and now at Texas Children’s Pediatrics, but Operations is a huge word. Tell us about what you do every day.

Diane: A lot. You actually summed it up really well. You know, operations really involves making sure that we get patients where they need to be, that they’re at the right level of care, that we’re working with our physician partners who ensure that any type of long term plans we’re turning into operational tactics to make sure that we get what we need, and that we move ourselves forward in terms of growth, in terms of providing new breakthroughs in science, and how that turns into clinical activity. All of those things can be encompassed in one day. So, in any given day, I might try to round, make sure that we’re getting our patients in, that they’re satisfied, that they actually got to where they were supposed to go.

Leisa: We were talking about that earlier. We were talking about customer service, but also this golden thread. So, describe Texas Children’s and its commitment to the golden thread.

Diane: Yes, actually today we as a system launched the STAR Kids product that is at the Texas level. It’s Texas Medicaid-managed care product. And we refer to these kids as our golden thread kids, and the reason is as we start to move away from just episodic care into population health, these kids are kids that sit in our Texas Children’s health plan, they actually go to our pediatric practices, and they seek care at our subspecialty level because they’re complex care. They’re kids with complex care needs, and so we actually have all the data on these kids and we can start to use the data to get into analytics of what can we do better, how can we intervene at different levels, and then ultimately what really gets exciting is predictive analytics. So what do we know about patterns? How do we make sure that these families are getting what they need; connecting them really far upstream to schools, other community resources, home health agencies and the like.

Leisa: So, Texas Children’s is a real jewel in the crown of the Texas Medical Center. I think our leading children’s hospital, if there was one thing you wanted people to know about Texas Children’s today, what is it?

Diane: Well that’s hard. Probably the heart. And I know that sounds so simple, but the heart of the people that work here and just this constant movement toward making the lives of children better. We are so mission centric that I think I have to say it’s our heart.

Leisa: Thank you very much. There you have it, another extraordinary woman doing extraordinary things. I’m Leisa Holland-Nelson, Co-founder and President of ContentActive, Houston’s leading web and mobile technology company. You can find me at contentactive.com or follow me on Twitter @lhnelson. We’ll be back again next week with another edition of Women Mean Business.