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

Utah’s Chief Medical Quality Officer Dr. Bob Pendleton shares his sister's experience navigating cancer care and challenges the idea of what it means to be a doctor: What if we were committed to understanding what matters to our patients, and then we used that information to improve care?

Process mapping is easy. But also hard. This is a common conundrum with value improvement. Here's part 1 of 4, wherein rules are distinguished from guidance.

We asked Zac Watne, Utah’s payment innovation manager (he gets paid to understand the volatile world of payment reform) to give us a primer on “bundles.” Regardless of change happening in health care, thought leaders predict that payment reform, and specifically bundled payments, are here to stay. Why? Bundles deliver care with improved outcomes at a lower price all over the United States. In this post, Zac predicts the future of bundles.

It’s part 2 of 4 in our series on process mapping. This post is about the reasons to build a process map. They’re inexpensive and so very often bear fruit for your effort.

It’s the third consecutive post in the Dojo’s summer of process mapping. Today I discuss 4 common facilitation issues LSS practitioners can avoid prior to, and during a mapping effort.

It’s post 4 of 4 in the Dojo’s process mapping series, which means summer is almost over. Today’s post is a listicle of technical items to watch for in your process map.

The hard work of improving value includes leading and engaging a team. Two improvers, Emily Carlson and Dr. Lauren Wood, share how they kept their teams engaged throughout a long (and sometimes inconclusive) improvement process.

Vascular surgeon Brigitte Smith is about to start her second year leading a value improvement curriculum for surgery residents. She believes you can’t be a great provider until you’re ready to lead a team to improve care delivery. Here, Smith shares the importance of recognition in motivating residents (and their teams) to learn to improve.

Dr. Kyle Bradford Jones describes how UNI’s HOME program solves its biggest problems and prevents patient burnout by asking patients for actionable input. The HOME program designs improvements with patients, rather than for patients.

Want to show your new employees that you respect them and you’re committed to making things better? Social work manager Kevin Curtis used University of Utah Health’s value improvement methodology to confront one of the most common challenges in health care—getting patients from the ED to a bed. Using concepts from lean and six sigma, Curtis identified waste, prioritized root causes, and fostered his team’s shared purpose in getting patients quickly to care.

For the past 20 years, Chrissy Daniels and Dan Lundergan have been hard at work – building culture, building space, building experiences and building trust. Practicing interviews are conversations between partners about why the work matters. Our goal is to preserve and share the stories of the teams at University of Utah Health.