CARA COOK

President

Healthcare Operations Consultant

  • With nearly 20 years of performance improvement and hospital administration experience, Cara provides healthcare operations consulting services that engage local leaders and meaningfully impact the bottom line. She has extensive experience in strategic planning, labor management, ER throughput, OR throughput, patient flow, clinical process and financial improvement work at for-profit hospitals, division-wide systems, and large academic medical centers.

  • Orlando Health Hospitals, Duke Health, Centura Health, Stanford Hospitals and Clinics, Bronson Healthcare, Maine Medical Center, Harris Health, HCA Gulf Coast, Health ONE, Envision Healthcare, Prisma Health, Abbott Laboratories

    • Collaborated with various corporate, division, and hospital executives on efforts that align with strategic plans and ultimately position hospitals for maximum growth and effective cost reduction at large for-profit system

    • Implemented labor management infrastructure, leveraging both support through education and accountability through reporting and action planning in multiple non-profit systems, several of which saved over $40M annually

    • Reduced Average Inpatient Length of Stay by more than 5%, saving millions of dollars and creating desperately needed bed capacity in a 16-hospital for-profit system in Florida

    • Partnered with clinical staff to understand needs and designed customized productivity tool solution to increase nursing unit utilization by 10% at large non-profit academic medical center

    • Created road map and engaged key stakeholders in enterprise-wide strategic goal visualization tool that highlights variation for timely intervention to support goals of large academic medical center

    • Set strategic and operational direction of Emergency Services initiatives for 16 hospital for-profit system, resulting in 7% ER visit growth, 13% reduction in wait times, and 30% reduction in patients who left prior to being seen

    • Streamlined startup/3rd party application integration process to pilot cutting edge solutions, enabling large academic medical system to effectively capitalize on Silicon Valley innovations