Valuable on the Job Learning

My name is Kriti Garg. I am a junior at Baylor University majoring in biology and economics. My goal is to attend medical school after completing my undergraduate degree. I had the privilege of working as an intern with the ACEP Quality and CEDR departments this summer in Dallas, Texas. I would like to thank everyone that I worked with for welcoming me and taking the time to answer what probably seemed like an endless stream of questions. The environment at ACEP is one of education and collaboration, and every day was a new learning experience.

During the course of my internship, I worked on a variety of different projects. Specifically, I became very familiar with the CEDR invoicing process and also worked on developing cost estimates for potential future customers, analyzing results from the CEDR customer satisfaction survey, and taking notes for the HIT Summit which took place at the beginning of July, 2019. Additionally, I spent a lot of time learning about quality measures, healthcare information technology, hospital administration organization, and payment models during orientation sessions with Dr. Goyal throughout the summer. The learning-based environment at ACEP not only made it possible, but actually encouraged me to take time out of my day to learn more about the broader context of projects on which I was working. I was able to gain a first-hand view of how ACEP advocates for emergency physicians and how the work we do affects emergency medicine as a whole. As an economics student, I was also able to see the value of learning more about healthcare business and how that might play into my career in the future.

The best part of the internship was, by far, the amount of hands-on work that I was able to do. Mr. Kapoor gave me a lot of freedom to choose the projects I worked on and how I competed them. For many projects, I was allowed to make mistakes, fix them, and use that as a learning experience in order to troubleshoot issues which I faced later. On other projects, I was given a goal and the opportunity to experiment and develop a process. This was much more valuable than simply shadowing projects, and I learned more than by watching other people work. The hands-on nature of the work also helped me to make connections between the different projects on which I was working.

The spirit of education at ACEP is really special, and I am thankful to have been able to be a small part of it this summer. Again, thank you to everyone who made this internship such a wonderful experience!