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The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Accelerate frequently chronicles the hard work of building and nurturing teams because we believe that real teams are the antidote to the chaos of modern medicine (in the words of Dr. Tom Lee). Here, we highlight a necessary ingredient of high-performing teams: motivation.

The Elephant, The Rider, and the Path to Change in Health Care

Drawing from psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s Elephant and the Rider metaphor, Utah's Chief Medical Quality Officer Bob Pendleton explains why emotions are critical to motivating change in health care. Behavioral economics, it appears, may provide the direction we need.

Invest In Your Team: Listening and Storytelling

University of Utah Health was an early adopter of bundled payments. Accelerate’s Mari Ransco sat down with Ryan VanderWerff, one of the first in our health system to participate in payment innovation, to learn firsthand what it takes to lead a team in turbulent times.

Our Community's Best of Utah

We're wrapping up our new faculty welcome with a short list from Accelerate's advisors on where to eat, what to do and a few locals-only insider tips.

Wendy Hobson-Rohrer: Five More Tips For Faculty

We were amazed by the traffic to Ryan and Ellen’s post on advice for new faculty. So we were thrilled when pediatrician and Associate Vice President for Health Sciences Education Wendy Hobson-Rohrer asked to write a follow-up! She knows from experience that navigating a career in academic medicine is more jungle gym than ladder. Here's her top five tips for all faculty.

Patient Experience 101: Kirk Hughs Looks Beyond the Percentile

Improvement in patient experience is often the hardest part of managers’ jobs. It takes consistent work engaging your team. There are no shortcuts. In this series, we’ll be sharing lessons learned the hard way from people working on the front lines to deliver care. In this post, specialty clinics director Kirk Hughs gives practical advice on looking beyond the percentile in your patient experience data.

A Framework to Measure Value-added Time in Health Care

The dojo welcomes guest author and senior value engineer Will McNett with a deep dive into clinic capacity utilization. McNett borrows from manufacturing to offer a framework to measure and increase what really matters to patients: time spent with their provider.

A Post About Nothing (sort of)

Zac Watne, Utah’s payment innovation manager (he gets paid to understand the volatile world of payment reform), is back with another update on “bundles.” In this post, Zac explains that while the latest news on bundles is important to know, it's much ado about nothing for University of Utah Health.

Why Rounding Demonstrates Respect for Patients and Teams

Rounding–the act of connecting with patients and staff–is a leadership best practice. While few find rounding easy to start, those who master it are hooked. It is a daily habit that improves patient care, experience and engages the team. Susan Clark and her medical director, Dr. Dana DeWitt, have taken the practice one step further by rounding together as a leadership dyad, resulting in a more connected and authentic team.

Is the Ear the Most Powerful Tool in Medicine?

Chrissy Daniels shares three powerful insights from Dr. Danielle Ofri’s new book, “What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear.” Ofri combines research and storytelling to explain the power of patient-doctor conversation and the common pitfalls that undermine connection and trust. She concludes the ear may be the most powerful tool in medicine.

Dr. Sean Stokes on Improving Opioid Prescribing Patterns

Using improvement methodology to solve one piece of America’s opioid epidemic. Dr. Sean Stokes and team used the practice of scoping to focus on one population and one procedure to achieve manageable, measurable improvement.

Can Netflix Help Us Choose a Physician?

Dr. Kyle Bradford Jones examines the Netflix algorithm for user preference as a model for developing provider selection tools that match patient values with their care needs.