With 5 Minutes Victoria Jordan BY JIM KILLIAN
Victoria Jordan grew up in Auburn and returned in her early career to pursue her master’s degree in industrial engineering (’87) and her doctorate (’06). She credits that experience to building her passion for process improvement. Vice president of quality at Emory Healthcare, she also serves as performance improvement and analytics director for the Kennedy Initiative for Transforming Care. JK: You’re an engineer – and an executive – at Emory Healthcare in Atlanta. Can you tell us what you do? VJ: I serve as the vice president of quality for Emory Healthcare and in that capacity oversee a group at the system level, and at each of our hospitals and outpatient areas to improve the care we deliver to our patients. One of the Institute of Medicine’s goals for quality is to have care that is safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable and patient-centered. In addition, we make sure that we are meeting the regulatory requirements that really are there to assure patient safety. We also look at ways to make the delivery of care more efficient, for example, by improving patient flow and the patient experience. Part of patient safety includes infection prevention and also data reporting – all of those are areas in our quality department. JK: How do you feel about your career preparation as it relates to Auburn? VJ: My experiences at Auburn prepared me for my job in many ways, although my undergraduate degree is not from Auburn. Because I grew up in town, I felt that I needed to get away – I graduated from the University of Kentucky and began my career as a statistician. Auburn kept drawing me back, and when I wanted to pursue my master’s at Auburn, I first considered statistics. I quickly realized it was a lot more theory than I wanted. I was already working at a manufacturing facility, had already been introduced to quality, and I wanted to 50 | Auburn Engineering
find ways to improve quality and efficiency in the work I was doing. Then somebody told me, ‘there are two professors over in industrial engineering who are doing applied statistics.’ That’s how I met Dr.[Jim] Hool and Dr. [Saeed] Maghsoodloo, who became my master’s advisors. I fell in love with design of experiments and industrial statistics, and all that came with that, and from that experience worked in industry again, at General Electric and then as a consultant. JK: You told me you were on the road 40 weeks out of the year – what was that like? VJ: I was young and single and it was great, a lot of fun. Then I met my husband Frank and we wanted to start a family, so I stayed out of the work force for 10 years – now the youngest one is in her last year of high school. I knew I would eventually want to go back to work, so I returned to Auburn for a Ph.D., again with Dr. Maghsoodloo as my advisor. It took me six years to finish! But there is no doubt now, I would not be in this position without this degree. In academic medical centers, a Ph.D. or clinical degree is typically expected at the director level or above. JK: I know from a previous conversation that your sister Cindy also had an impact on your career. VJ: Yes, I was close to my sister, who was 18 months younger. While I was working on my doctorate, we both lived in Auburn and she and had a young family like Visit Auburn Engineering online at
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