By Sam Marie Engle
What do you do when you need an industrial engineer, a nurse, a business manager, and even a military commander as well as a Sigma Black Belt and Certified Quality Engineer on your quality team? If you’re Emory Radiology’s Marta Heilbrun, professor and vice chair for quality, you hire LaTasha Paige.
LaTasha is Emory Radiology’s new program director for imaging services quality and patient safety. Only two months into the job and she knows this is where she belongs.
“In this role now, all the things I ever wanted to do I get to do: quality, safety, process improvement, system thinking. I’m really connecting the dots to see how it all fits together,” she says.
Already she’s partnering with Dr. Colin Segovis, assistant professor and member of the Community Radiology Specialists division serving Emory’s suburban hospitals and outpatient imaging centers, on standardizing workflows for magnetic resonance imaging to improve safety and quality.
She’s collaborating with Dr. Nadja Kadom, professor in the divisions of Pediatric Imaging and Neuroradiology, on restarting the department’s Patient Family Advisory Group. She also is also planning to work with Emory Radiology’s Imaging Informatics team on training. “If the workflow is disrupted, it causes issues, so improvement is needed on training, especially in preparation for the new systems coming online this year,” she says.
This kind of collaborative problem-solving is what drew her to quality work. “Being an industrial engineer is a very flexible role: our job is to make things better for people and I love that. For us, it’s about analyzing a situation or process flow and saying, ‘How do I fix this puzzle? How do I bring stability to this situation?’ At the end of the day, it’s about helping people, whether it’s a patient or a work team, and that’s what excites me.”
LaTasha earned an MS in industrial and systems engineering from Auburn University. After spending over a decade working in manufacturing, she became an industrial engineer for Baptist Health in Montgomery, Alabama. The reason was simple: “I want to improve the quality of health care.”
With ample transferrable skills, LaTasha really enjoyed the work, but something was missing. “At an American Society for Quality conference, I was talking to people about making the move from industry to health care and this guy said no one would listen to me in health care when it came to quality because I hadn’t been a health care provider myself. That really struck me.”
LaTasha promptly enrolled in Jefferson State Community College and earned a AAS in nursing. The degree mattered, but even more valuable was the experience. “I found out it’s very tough for nurses, tough but rewarding. That’s exactly what I needed.” She subsequently advanced her training with a BS in nursing from the University of Alabama.
LaTasha joined Emory Healthcare in 2019 as a management engineer for Winship Cancer Institute. Her primary role was to help teams improve both their day-to-day work and the patient experience. She loved it. When the opportunity arose with Emory Radiology, she jumped at the chance to work in such a large, multifaceted department.
Augmenting her academic and professional training has been her service in the Alabama National Guard, which she joined in 2010. She currently is the Company Commander for the 1207/1208th Quartermaster Company in Fort McClellan, AL. In 2018, she deployed as the Chief Operations Officer for the 831st Transportation Battalion in Bahrain. She credits the military for giving her the kinds of skills training unavailable at any university.
“Going through Officer Candidate School has made everything easier for me because it taught me how to operate under pressure with so many simultaneous demands. Having that mindset and background has helped me handle the kinds of complex situations that arise in health care.” She leans forward. “Military service taught me how to adapt and be flexible and develop resiliency. I tell my soldiers all the time, ‘Life is full of adversity, so stay resilient.’ The idea of accomplishing a goal is what keeps me grounded, knowing there is an answer. There’s always a solution. It may take creativity and mind changing but there’s always a solution. I tell them to look at what we’ve got that we didn’t have, things we thought were impossible and would never happen, and look, here they are!”
It’s a helpful mindset and helping comes naturally to LaTasha.
“Overall, I’m a helper. If anyone needs anything, feel free to reach out. I like learning so I’ll happily respond. The more I know the more helpful I can be.”
Perhaps her greatest challenge is helping the department come to terms with the new normal wrought by the COVID pandemic. “How do we function moving forward given the reality that COVID isn’t going away, and we just can’t operate as we did before?”
LaTasha Paige is already working on it, so stay tuned.
What do you do when you need an industrial engineer, a nurse, a business manager, and even a military commander as well as a Sigma Black Belt and Certified Quality Engineer on your quality team? If you’re Emory Radiology’s Marta Heilbrun, professor and vice chair for quality, you hire LaTasha Paige.
LaTasha is Emory Radiology’s new program director for imaging services quality and patient safety. Only two months into the job and she knows this is where she belongs.
“In this role now, all the things I ever wanted to do I get to do: quality, safety, process improvement, system thinking. I’m really connecting the dots to see how it all fits together,” she says.
Already she’s partnering with Dr. Colin Segovis, assistant professor and member of the Community Radiology Specialists division serving Emory’s suburban hospitals and outpatient imaging centers, on standardizing workflows for magnetic resonance imaging to improve safety and quality.
She’s collaborating with Dr. Nadja Kadom, professor in the divisions of Pediatric Imaging and Neuroradiology, on restarting the department’s Patient Family Advisory Group. She also is also planning to work with Emory Radiology’s Imaging Informatics team on training. “If the workflow is disrupted, it causes issues, so improvement is needed on training, especially in preparation for the new systems coming online this year,” she says.
This kind of collaborative problem-solving is what drew her to quality work. “Being an industrial engineer is a very flexible role: our job is to make things better for people and I love that. For us, it’s about analyzing a situation or process flow and saying, ‘How do I fix this puzzle? How do I bring stability to this situation?’ At the end of the day, it’s about helping people, whether it’s a patient or a work team, and that’s what excites me.”
LaTasha earned an MS in industrial and systems engineering from Auburn University. After spending over a decade working in manufacturing, she became an industrial engineer for Baptist Health in Montgomery, Alabama. The reason was simple: “I want to improve the quality of health care.”
With ample transferrable skills, LaTasha really enjoyed the work, but something was missing. “At an American Society for Quality conference, I was talking to people about making the move from industry to health care and this guy said no one would listen to me in health care when it came to quality because I hadn’t been a health care provider myself. That really struck me.”
LaTasha promptly enrolled in Jefferson State Community College and earned a AAS in nursing. The degree mattered, but even more valuable was the experience. “I found out it’s very tough for nurses, tough but rewarding. That’s exactly what I needed.” She subsequently advanced her training with a BS in nursing from the University of Alabama.
LaTasha joined Emory Healthcare in 2019 as a management engineer for Winship Cancer Institute. Her primary role was to help teams improve both their day-to-day work and the patient experience. She loved it. When the opportunity arose with Emory Radiology, she jumped at the chance to work in such a large, multifaceted department.
Augmenting her academic and professional training has been her service in the Alabama National Guard, which she joined in 2010. She currently is the Company Commander for the 1207/1208th Quartermaster Company in Fort McClellan, AL. In 2018, she deployed as the Chief Operations Officer for the 831st Transportation Battalion in Bahrain. She credits the military for giving her the kinds of skills training unavailable at any university.
“Going through Officer Candidate School has made everything easier for me because it taught me how to operate under pressure with so many simultaneous demands. Having that mindset and background has helped me handle the kinds of complex situations that arise in health care.” She leans forward. “Military service taught me how to adapt and be flexible and develop resiliency. I tell my soldiers all the time, ‘Life is full of adversity, so stay resilient.’ The idea of accomplishing a goal is what keeps me grounded, knowing there is an answer. There’s always a solution. It may take creativity and mind changing but there’s always a solution. I tell them to look at what we’ve got that we didn’t have, things we thought were impossible and would never happen, and look, here they are!”
It’s a helpful mindset and helping comes naturally to LaTasha.
“Overall, I’m a helper. If anyone needs anything, feel free to reach out. I like learning so I’ll happily respond. The more I know the more helpful I can be.”
Perhaps her greatest challenge is helping the department come to terms with the new normal wrought by the COVID pandemic. “How do we function moving forward given the reality that COVID isn’t going away, and we just can’t operate as we did before?”
LaTasha Paige is already working on it, so stay tuned.