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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.

"Call me Kate”: Safety Culture Lessons from Ghana

In Ghana, Value Engineer Cindy Spangler, surgeons Kate Smiley and Marta McCrum found that patient safety rests on simple ideas that are hard in practice.

How UNI HOME Program Integrated Care

Organizing around patient needs isn’t easy. It involves changing traditional reporting relationships and patterns of care delivery. Over nearly 20 years, UNI’s HOME Program has refined how the team works together to deliver better care for some of our most vulnerable patients. Now the nation is learning from these frontline leaders.

Start with "Why"

We begin every Accelerate interview by asking about a person’s intrinsic motivation to work in health care, lead a team, or make a change. In other words, we always start with “why.”

Brent Klev Shares Three Ways to Foster Shared Purpose

What if a patient described their care team as “incredibly competent, experienced and collaborative”*? Those are the adjectives used by a patient to describe their surgery at South Jordan Health Center. As the nurse manager of South Jordan’s surgical services, Brent Klev works to ensure that every patient has that experience. Here, Klev shares three ways he fosters a culture of teamwork through shared purpose.

The Effective Communicator: How to Craft a Story

The Effective Communicator is back to answer your troublesome communication questions. This week: how to craft a compelling story.