Rowena Chona Ortiz Sano, registered nurse and alternate administrator, ACP Health Care Resources Inc., Houston

Chona Sano is a senior member of ASQ and has been a member since 1993. She is the alternate administrator of ACP Health Care Resources, a home health agency, and a staff nurse at the Ben Taub General Hospital, Harris County Hospital District, Houston.

Sano’s exposure to the quality field began 27 years ago when she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of the Philippines. Her first job as a quality engineer at San Miguel Corp., an Asian multinational corporation based in Manila, Philippines, started her exciting and long journey in the quality field.

There, Sano’s work included quality systems audits, setting up quality systems for new and existing businesses, and conducting corporatewide training on quality. She was one of the first few quality auditors certified by ASQC in Manila. Sano was an active member of the Philippine Society for Quality, and her duties included setting up the first National Quality Forum and editing the organization’s newsletter.

Later, Sano moved on to be a quality management consultant and was a director of Rosehall Management Consultants Inc. She was a senior consultant at Rosehall and served as business development director, director for operations and quality management representative. She has assisted 24 manufacturing and service organizations—both private and governmental—achieve certification to ISO 9001/9002, QS-9000 and other international standards. In 1998, Sano served as an examiner for the Philippine Quality Awards (cycle two). She also conducted public training courses in quality management and ISO 9000/QS-9000.

Her involvement with the healthcare sector started when she assisted the Makati Medical Center, a premier hospital in the Philippines, establish its quality management system based on ISO 9002, a former quality management standard, for which they later obtained certification.

When her family moved to Houston in 2000, Sano worked in the home care industry as a quality assurance manager, where she was responsible for maintaining the agency’s quality system and accreditation to the Joint Commission. She later became an alternate administrator at one agency, and then became an administrator at different agency where she helped set up licensure and Medicare certification. Currently, Sano provides consulting services for other home care agencies to assist them in obtaining their Joint Commission accreditation and Medicare certification.

At ACP Health Care Resources, where she currently works as the alternate administrator, Sano is the overall coordinator for maintaining Joint Commission accreditation, which she helped set up for its initial accreditation survey. Together with the administrator and the management team, she spearheads goal setting and annual planning, monitoring performance indicators and other quality programs. She conducts in-service sessions on quality concepts and other standards-related topics. Sano assists in establishing quality projects and other initiatives of the agency in improving its patient outcomes.

ACP Health Care Resources has been listed in the top 500 home care agencies in the United States and was recently a recipient of the Gold Award for meeting its targets for the three outcomes set by Centers for Medical and Medicaid Services and the Texas Medical Foundation. These outcomes are acute care hospitalization, improvement in pain and management of oral medications. Sano’s hospital experience as a medical-surgical and critical care registered nurse provides her the clinical knowledge in coordination of care and case management in home health.

Sano said she found Sister Mary Jean Ryan’s book, On Becoming Exceptional: SSM Health Care's Journey to Baldrige and Beyond, inspiring, and she gave a copy to her administrator to sell her on the concept of working for the Malcolm Baldrige national Quality Award.  

Sano offered some insight on her move to the healthcare field, the use of quality tools and principles, and advice to those new to quality:

“Shifting to the healthcare field was a challenge for me. Healthcare deals with human lives and requires immediate action.
 
“Because there are so many tools and techniques that are not yet fully utilized in the healthcare field—such as basic tools, cost of quality, failure mode effects analysis and design of experiments—it is a challenge to find applications and to convince the staff in using these tools. While evidence based care has gained acceptance in the hospitals, it still has to gain use and implementation in home care. It would be great to conduct research in home health care, using various tools and techniques.

“In healthcare, each individual’s situation is unique and must be handled separately. This requires a healthcare professional to gather all his or her knowledge and synthesize it to provide the appropriate care. There is no one formula for providing care.

“Client feedback is immediate. It is important for a healthcare professional to have good communication skills and be able to manage clients’ expectations. And since we are dealing with human beings, it is not always easy. However, the fact that management involvement and everyone’s buy-in to the quality program spell success remains true in the healthcare field.

“You have to be passionate about your belief that quality is important not only in your job, but also in your personal life. You have to have the courage and strength to stand for quality, and this is not always easy.”