Bringing Care to the Community During COVID-19 and Beyond
As the vice president of nursing, clinical platforms service line, Michelle Vassallo, MHA Health Systems Management ’15, is responsible for managing a lot of moving parts to keep the Inova Hospital System running as seamlessly as possible. As a part of one of Inova’s eleven service line teams, a typical day for Vassallo could involve working with contractors and physician groups, reviewing processes to make care more accessible and to increase the availability of providers for patients, or assessing clinical teams’ policies and procedures to ensure that patients are getting the best quality care possible from these services across all five hospitals in Inova’s system. She also looks at how services can be expanded, contracted, or improved to meet the needs of the community.
Vassallo’s typical days quickly changed with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic though.
When Inova diagnosed its first COVID-19 patient, Vassallo worked her last day in the hospital, where she also served as the associate chief nurse on Inova’s Fairfax campus. With her experience in operations, she was pulled into the hospital system’s central command center for its COVID-19 response to prepare for a potential surge in cases in Northern Virginia.
“It was like being back in the thick of things when I worked in our trauma center,” said Vassallo.
While at Mason, Vassallo studied a variety of topics to gain a more holistic understanding of healthcare administration. Her courses covered everything from the history of healthcare to leadership to economics, statistics, and other topics to see how the different elements work together. All of this work came in handy as she planned Inova’s COVID-19 vaccination efforts.
Vassallo led a multidisciplinary team of infection preventionists, physicians, research colleagues, and others to develop Inova’s vaccination plan. She met with ethics leaders to decide how to tier vaccine distribution based on risk adjustment. Former military team members were essential in planning the logistics of how to move people through the clinic while maintaining social distancing and other safety measures.
“We looked at all kinds of things from the medical science, infection prevention, and the ethics and implications of distribution, and then technology, because no one had platforms built for mass vaccination efforts, so that was really challenging,” Vassallo said. “We also had a whole research team taking the scientific evidence and translating it into FAQs for team members and public statements so people could learn more about our process.”
Inova’s first vaccination clinic was set up for employees in a converted conference center cafeteria. Once all of Inova’s employees were vaccinated, they worked on getting vaccines out into the community, and within 53 days, they reached a major milestone: 100,000 vaccinations.
Celebrating the 100,000 COVID-19 vaccination at an Inova vaccination clinic.
In March, Inova announced that it would open a large-scale vaccination clinic in Alexandria’s Victory Center as part of a partnership with Fairfax County and the City of Alexandria. The Stonebridge COVID-19 Vaccination Center location was larger, more ADA accessible, and closer to public transportation options, making the location much more accessible to different population groups in Northern Virginia. The clinic had the capacity to vaccinate up to 6,000 people per day—doubling the current capacity—and Inova has provided nearly 450,000 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine since the start of the pandemic. Vassallo was instrumental in opening these mass vaccination clinics, and she was on the ground directing people on line, getting more doses of the vaccines, and doing whatever else was needed to keep things running smoothly and getting doses in arms.
“Just from the standpoint of the actual lives that we prevented from being lost and the impact that we had in our community, I think implementing the mass vaccination clinics will probably be the highlight of my career,” said Vassallo.
For all of her efforts to bring vaccines to the Northern Virginia community, she was recognized in the Washingtonian with an Excellence in Nursing Award.
Looking forward, Vassallo hopes that they are able to learn from the pandemic to continue making a meaningful impact in the community. She wants to continue working towards making healthcare accessible for everyone while combatting inequalities in the system.
“It’s time to think about how you take those lessons learned and apply them to other things. Now that I know more about our safety nets in the community, how do I use that for good when I hear something come up? How do I tie together resources that existed, but were not tethered in any way before? How do we work on equality, and how do we bridge some of those gaps and incentivize everybody to do the right things take care of yourself?”
Written by Kristen Greiner, MFA ’20