Clinician Spotlight: Gabriella Mitchell, MBA RN

Regional VP/Value Management Lead and CNO – South 

Clinical and support staff are the backbone of the healthcare industry. Often asked to work with few resources to deliver care at the most important times in a patient’s care journey, clinicians deserve recognition and appreciation for all they do. 

Faced with a workforce crisis like never before, health systems and hospitals need someone who understands these challenges — and at Get Well, we do understand. And we certainly appreciate those on our staff who have spent time as clinicians. That’s why we’re launching the Get Well Clinician Spotlight series — an opportunity to give the clinicians who work for Get Well the recognition they deserve and the space to share their stories and thoughts about the biggest challenges facing today’s clinician workforce.

Gabriella Mitchell, MBA RN
Regional VP/Value Management Lead and CNO – South

Please share a little about your clinical background and what brought you to Get Well.

I am an RN of 34 years graduating from the University of Florida. I have worked in critical care my entire career, specifically in cardiac surgery and heart/lung transplantation at Mount Sinai, Emory and Greenville Hospital System. At Emory, I was responsible for surgical services for both Emory and Crawford Long campuses, running the transplant and general surgery service lines, including women’s health.

At Greenville Health System, I oversaw the CardioVascular Division and all of critical care for the enterprise. I had been recruited to design and execute an innovation hospital located in South Carolina, responsible for design, build, and administration of patient care and associated ancillary services. Ultimately, I was recruited to Get Well to help lead the Clinical Practice Design development for the VA health system and eventually transferred to the commercial team. My current role is a Divisional VP, for which I encourage and leverage use of the Get Well platform, identify areas of growth, and negotiate on key renewal opportunities.

How have you used Get Well solutions in the field?

Yes, as part of the innovation hospital, my team attended a day in the life at one of our Get Well hospitals and they requested I evaluate the solution for consideration. After doing so, I decided Get Well would offer a key opportunity to distinguish the new hospital within the growing Greenville market and offer some competitive edge. We implemented several pathways, including falls to which we won an award for at Get Connected a year later. We had presented our processes at several Get Connected Conferences to demonstrate our performance and impact. While we did not have integrated orders and results, we did leverage the automation of information and used the system to allow for completion of regulatory required information. As new practices joined our hospital, we allowed them to consider using Get Well to provide key information for their specific services offered and did create content and videos that aligned with the physicians work and expectations for the care that was delivered. Optimally, ortho was the key service, along with general surgery.

What do you enjoy most about your work?

What I enjoy about my work are the people. I love engaging and building relationships with our client partners, some of which were established a decade ago, but I also value our team. Building and watching a team grow and support each other and advance their careers is what true leadership represents.

I also enjoy engaging with clients in the field and listening and applying creative ways to use the platform to enhance the experience. We have some very crafty teams using our IP solution, but also with what they are using Rounds and the Whiteboard for.  

Knowing that Get Well can be used in a variety of use cases despite the way the client is contracted. The flexibility to offer ways to solve a specific problem that a client might have and to watch the concept develop and then evolve itself into a best practice.

What are some of the biggest challenges facing today’s clinician workforce? 

Currently, we are continuing to deal with critical staffing in certain demographics. We are creating an environment whereby we are competing for resources against one another, leveraging salary and other incentives. While healthy competition is appropriate, we are creating our own devastating impact in the field. Additionally, financial constraints have limited internal access to tools and supplies and changed the way we actually care for patients, which has in turn changed the experience. It has become difficult to balance such an unstable environment and maintain the care expectations that our patients have.

What is the best way to address those challenges?

Clearly any tools that simplify the process of care delivery, but this requires a constantly changing environment and evaluation of tools to ensure the best approaches. Anywhere that automation can alleviate the workload and ensure compliance can and will have a profound impact that not only care and information are provided, but that the regulations are maintained. Flexibility of technology systems are also key to help support those ever changing requirements while maintaining the experience and that does not require frequent changes to the clinician workflow as it may have been initially defined when the software was implemented. 

The key to all of this is to ensure that leadership is grounded in the philosophy of the tools and constantly assessing the impact that they have. It is up to them to deliver the message on the expectations and hold accountable the leaders on the desired value to which they have agreed to deliver to their patients.