Good Samaritan Hospital employee wins national HCA Healthcare Innovation award
Good Samaritan Hospital provides healthcare services to Silicon Valley, one of the most innovative regions in the world. So, we are incredibly proud that one of our own, Henok Getahun, has been recognized with this year's HCA Healthcare Innovators Award. The award is given to one individual who truly embodies the spirit of innovation and is chosen from more than 275,000 employees across 184 hospitals nationwide.
Henok is our central equipment distribution manager, responsible for making sure our care teams have all the equipment they need, from the “crash carts” that are essential for rapid care in our emergency department, to the beds in our patient rooms. We've transformed the process of getting the right equipment where it needs to be at the right time thanks to his ingenuity and hard work.
One of Henok's innovations is a Cart Exchange Program covering Crash Carts, Chest Tube Carts, Urology Carts, and Pacemaker Carts. The program ensures that the staff has ready access to fully equipped carts from a central location, and so they don't have to worry about restocking individual items on a cart after it has been used for a patient. It saves time and ensures the care team has everything they need for the next patient.
Henok set up a designated room consisting of fully inventoried items and developed an app that scans a QR code on each cart to identify which items have expired in real time. He also created a new process to clean critical patient care equipment, including IV pumps, and to transport them efficiently to nursing.
He's even come up with a better way to manage our fleet of rented beds that helped discover six unused ones in our inventory, saving the hospital thousands each year and reducing deep tissue injuries in patients by helping to identify if a patient needs a specialty bed and getting it to them quicker.
Henok joined Good Samaritan Hospital in 2010 as a housekeeper, then transferred to Sterile Processing as a Materials Specialist and worked his way up into management. Today, he is one of the most beloved members of our team that puts patients first in everything he does.
Congratulations to Henok for everything he does to deliver healthier tomorrows to our community!