Quoteworthy
As trusted educators and advisors, we are responsible for helping our patients regain their faith in the health care system.
Alison Schlisman and Bernadette Kiraly

Most Recent
Shared Governance: A Foundation for a Culture of Nursing Excellence

Magnet Program Director Mary-Jean (Gigi) Austria explains how Nursing Shared Governance provides support for knowledge sharing, clinical skill building, and collaborative decision-making closest to the point of care.

Shared Governance: Harnessing Our Collective Strengths

Shared governance is a decision-making model designed to empower the people who care for patients. Chief Nursing Officer Tracey Nixon explains what it is, how it impacts you, and what to expect in the coming months.

TRUE Stories—Fostering a Passion for Solving Big Problems

Access to medical care isn't a given. Medical students from the Tribal, Rural, and Underserved Medical Education (TRUE) Graduate Certificate program tell us first-hand experiences that helped them build a passion for complex problem solving by experiencing big, systemic challenges up close.

How to Turn a Gut Feeling into a QI Project

Your gut tells you a process could be better than it is—how do you back that feeling up with hard data? Senior value engineer Luca Boi shows how undertaking a baseline analysis can jumpstart your improvement project.

Quality Improvement

Hospitalist Ryan Murphy introduces quality improvement (QI): The systematic and continuous approach to improvement.

Stop Waiting and Start Working: Four Tips from the Help Desk

We all do it. We draw a blank on our password, get locked out of login, “…duo what?” and so on. And then we wait for a University of Utah Health service desk saint who makes our machine work again. To help lighten their load a bit—and make our lives easier—we asked ITS Manager Mike Madsen for his “Top 4” preventive measures to avoid a call.

What Improvement Taught Me About Gardening

Every summer, senior value engineer Cindy Spangler stocks our offices with an abundance of tomatoes, zucchini, and squash. We asked her to share how improvement thinking influences her gardening. Turns out, there are parallels–learn from others, stick to your scope, and learn from the mistakes.

How to Solve Complex Problems

From the simple to the complex, problems plague our daily work. Quality Improvement experts Luca Boi and Ryan Murphy provide brief lessons and resources covering important problem solving techniques so you can develop solutions and make improvements.

Zero Suicide - How Do We Get There?

The Zero Suicide initiative has been shown to significantly reduce suicides—and working toward zero suicides is our mission. Rachael Jasperson, Zero Suicide program manager, shares the framework for how we strive for this aspirational goal.

The "How To" of Problem Solving: Strategies for Facilitating Continuous Improvement

Problems—we all have them. From the simple to the complex, they plague our daily work. Quality Improvement experts Luca Boi and Carolyn Brayko provide brief lessons and simple exercises on problem solving techniques so you can develop solutions and make improvements.

Fishbone Diagram: A Tool to Organize a Problem’s Cause and Effect

Problems. We all have them. Whether it’s a check engine light or an adverse patient safety event, we first need to discover what’s causing the problem before trying out solutions. Senior Value Engineer Luca Boi and a team of Oncology residents get to the root cause using a fishbone diagram.

Pebble in Who’s Shoe? PegPad Patient-driven Design

Value culture encourages us to look for and resolve our day-to-day problems and inefficiencies by asking, “What’s the pebble in my shoe?” But what happens when the pebble is in the patient’s shoe? Recent biomedical engineering grad Kyler Hodgson, operations manager Sarah Burton, and gastroenterology chief John Fang share how listening to patients can result in solutions that meet patient needs.