Katelin Morrissette, MD | Safety, Quality, Informatics and Leadership
Safety, Quality, Informatics and Leadership graduate, Dr. Katelin Morrissette, is a pulmonary and critical care physician and clinical informaticist at the University of Vermont Medical Center, and assistant professor at the University of Vermont. A graduate of Michigan Technological University with a BS in Biomedical Engineering, she went on to earn her MD at the Medical College of Wisconsin. She completed her residency in Emergency Medicine at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center followed by a fellowship in Critical Care Medicine at the University of Arizona Medical Center. Dr. Morrissette completed the Safety, Quality, Informatics and Leadership certificate program, designed to help participants gain the tools and knowledge needed to drive system-wide improvement and is now gearing up for her new role as quality improvement leader.
Informatics to Solve Real Health Care Problems
With a diverse background, training first as an engineer, Dr. Morrissette also traveled between Australia and Utah in search of endless winter skiing, before jumping into her medical career. Dr. Morrissette has been in the MICU at the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington, VT for the past 5 years. As a MICU doctor during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, she experienced the critical need for informatics and data on COVID-19 mortality rates. From that experience she began working with the clinical informatics team to get physician builder training on reporting and analytics. With this training she started to pull data and build tools to fill in gaps.
She discussed some of the challenges in rural health care and why she is passionate about informatics and quality. “Right now, we don't have much data…Where do patients come from? What do they need? How can we most efficiently provide the best care? One of my hopes from this course was to gain some skills in leading people from lots of different spaces and to use them.”
Dr. Morrissette was recently promoted network intensive care unit quality improvement leader where she will work with network ICU medical directors and staff to support quality improvement projects, establish priorities and coordinate work across departments to improve care in line with the network mission.
“This new position is a really nice fit, it’s where I was hoping to go,” she said.
Flexible Blended-Format while Delivering Skills
The Safety, Quality, Informatics and Leadership program is delivered in a one-year, blended format which includes live webinars, pre-recorded lectures and three multi-day workshops (two virtual, one held in Boston).
In addition to Dr. Morrissette’s busy professional obligations, she has a young family. “The nice piece of this certificate was that I could do the majority of the course remotely…I've got two young kids, so I needed something I could do without having to leave my family. That was really important to me.” She went on to say, “The content was just an excellent fit. It was essentially exactly what I wanted. I didn't know anything about safety and quality, but I knew that I needed to. I was really interested in informatics, and I see very few courses that combine them; though to me, they seemed like a natural pairing.”
Practical Application
Dr. Morrissette noted she had a lot of lectures on quality and safety, but it was the delivery and application of concepts that has stuck with her.
She said, “the way that concepts were presented were very practical. I felt like I can take that work and change what I was doing tomorrow. I think the safety and quality use cases were not theoretical, it was practical, and that was really great.” She also discussed the support from faculty, “I think that when the faculty spoke, they spoke to us as peers. They weren't giving us something theoretical or talking about this great work that they did, but I felt their genuine intent was to help us be able to do good work where we were, and I feel like that was achieved.”
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