From left: Ronald Villota, MSN, RN; Danae Dent; and Germaine Chan, MD.
When patients come into the Emergency Department for urgent care—and are also on dialysis—it is critical that physicians receive timely and complete information about their medications and dialysis orders.
To help expedite the process at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s, Martine Pollack-Zollman, MD, Assistant Professor, Nephrology, and Medical Director of Inpatient Hemodialysis, and Ronald Villota, MSN, RN, Nurse Manager of the Rehabilitation and Hemodialysis Unit, turned to Danae Dent, who is unit secretary and a key player in ensuring efficient operations.
Danae was excited about the assignment from the start, Ronald says. Her plan included staying in close contact with the Emergency Department to identify dialysis patients as soon as they were registered, then calling their usual hemodialysis sites to quickly capture information about their treatment. She also created a detailed spreadsheet to share this data with the medical staff.
Danae’s work impressed the entire team. Dr. Pollack-Zollman says the “always smiling and helpful” Danae has done an amazing job. She adds, “Her proactivity made the process much smoother and easier than we imagined it could be.”
Germaine Chan, MD, Assistant Clinical Professor, Nephrology, says, “Danae is an invaluable asset to our team. She was able to provide needed information on patients before I was even called to treat them. This is a first.”
Danae says she is humbled by the outpouring of gratitude by her team. “I sit near my physicians and was able to get a sense of their needs. It gives me great pleasure to help my colleagues out and make our unit, and the patient experience, the best it can be.”