Having professional mentors made a world of difference for Abbey Olsen when she was a new transplant quality professional at the University of Utah Hospital. Olsen was transitioning into a transplant quality managerial role and working to build the transplant quality team from the ground up and says she gained valuable advice from her mentors.
She was matched with mentors by The Alliance through the recommendation of her senior director, Kim Phillips, who she says believes strongly in continuing education. She signed up for The Alliance’s Mentorship Program and initially worked with Jenna Lawson, Abdominal Transplant Quality Consultant at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
“Jenna identified the key components of a successful quality program for me,” says Olsen. “I understood the policies around compliance reporting, but I was not able to connect all of the dots to determine how to build a quality program that would be sustainable as we added additional people to the team.”
Olsen then was matched with Deepa Kurup, Senior Director of the Center for Transplantation at UC San Diego Health, as her mentor. “Deepa was instrumental in my successful transition into a managerial role and advised me on advocating for additional resources for my team and identifying the skill sets that are required to create a multi-disciplinary quality team,” she says. “Having these mentors provided a sense of grounding and gave me the confidence to continue to develop professionally and make decisions about building the infrastructure of a quality team.”
Olsen now serves on The Alliance’s Transplant Quality Corner Workgroup. “It’s important that people are aware of the resources that are available to help them be successful,” says Olsen. “The Alliance connected me with different mentors as I was starting my professional journey. Now I’m able to contribute as a member of The Alliance’s Transplant Quality Corner Workgroup where we share insights that we’ve learned to help other quality professionals. That speaks to the great work that The Alliance does.”
In 2024, she also worked as part of the national group led by Celeste Braly, Director of Quality and Compliance at the UW Health Transplant Center on the development of the Transplant Community Collaborative Crosswalk. “Having Celeste act as a mentor for the entire transplant quality community has been amazing,” says Olsen. “It was my first introduction to how the transplant community pulls together.”
Olsen received her BSN from Idaho State University in 2018, while also completing medical school prerequisites. “Nursing school helped me become a more well-rounded person,” she says. “I was able to connect better with those around me and recognize the small things that you can do make a big difference in in the lives of others.”
After college, she worked as a critical care nurse at McKay-Dee Hospital from 2018-2021. During COVID said the number of patients in the critical care unit sometimes exceeded the number of nurses or support staff available, so staff members who normally did not work in the ICU were pulled in to help. She had the opportunity to be a charge nurse for some shifts and worked to support those staff members from other units such as medical surgical or pediatrics who were unfamiliar with working in an ICU.
Olsen says that an underpinning theme to her life, going back to her childhood days, has been to understand the why behind any principle. “Knowing the why allows you to really dig in and improve something or at least understand what all the little pieces mean as you pull them together,” says Olsen.
It was during the height of COVID that she decided to pursue a graduate degree at Weber State University. During her studies, she dived into learning about formal process improvement systems, as well as advancements in informatics and technology. After receiving her MSN degree, she looked for opportunities to implement her new skills and knowledge and says she stumbled into transplant and moved into a role as a transplant quality consultant.
“I had taken care of donors in the ICU but seeing recipients and their families and the benefit that has been given to them through that gift of life has definitely cemented my love of transplantation,” she says. “I have yet to work with a group of more passionate, skilled people than in transplantation. We are all part of a bigger system, working to provide a service not only to those recipients and donors as well as their families, but also to the professionals within the industry.”
In her current role as transplant quality regulatory data manager, she leads a team of process improvement and data entry professionals. “My job is to help people connect the many different pieces of a large, complicated, multifaceted system and ensure that the end goal is getting the patients the care that they need. It is important, though, that the team that is providing the care for the patients also is supported and receives the resources that they need to do their job as effectively, effectively, and efficiently as possible.”
Olsen says that in addition to using the Lean Six Sigma method for process improvement, her team works to visualize the story of transplant and she references the Scientific Registry for Transplant Recipients (SRTR) Interactive System Map. “We work to visualize data about transplant and our processes for executives to make the transplant journey as seamless and effective as possible. With the clinical teams, we want them to understand the why of what we’re doing for our patients so they can see that little changes made in their workflows can have a huge impact on the ability of our patients to receive care.”
She notes a recent change in their referral process for transplantation that reduced the number of requirements for health maintenance testing or other labs from ten to three or four and resulted in patients being moved more quickly to seeing a provider to be evaluated for transplant. “That change has definitely led us to evaluating more patients than we ever have and adding more potential kidney recipients to the waitlist over the past couple of years,” she says.
She says she now serves as a mentor for her team members and that she works to be a transformational leader and inspire her team to reach a shared vision. “Going back to the why of things, I embrace Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle concept that has the “Why” at the center of its framework,” says Olsen. “You have to understand the why before you move into the how and the what. We try to identify that large goal and work on checkpoints throughout the journey as opposed to having just a checklist of items for improvement.”
Olsen grew up in Preston, Idaho made famous as the location of the movie “Napoleon Dynamite” (her childhood home is shown in the background in a scene near the end of the movie). She has two younger brothers and says they and her parents are very close and that they are her ongoing support system. They speak on the phone regularly and gather frequently at her parents’ house.
Olsen’s love of learning and always wanting to know the ‘why’ made her a conscientious student and she was active in the Key Club and the National Honor Society in high school. She loves to read, both fiction and non-fiction, and is pursuing her love of learning by studying computer coding so she can more efficiently create data visualizations.
She is a classically train pianist and plays the piano to relax. She lives just north of Salt Lake City where she disconnects from work by exploring nature. She says one thing people may not know about her is that she’s an adrenaline junkie and has gone bungee jumping and skydiving and rides dirt bikes, motorcycles, and snowmobiles.
Olsen said one of her favorite quotes is by Organizational Psychologist Adam Grant that distinguishes good leaders from great leaders. “With my team, I am working to build sustainable change,” she says. “I’m always there to help support, but I don’t always have to lead.”
