Sterile Processing runs a lean operation, delivering millions of instruments to University of Utah Health’s procedural teams. Director of value engineering Steve Johnson, assisted by the video wizardry of Charlie Ehlert, sheds light on our system’s unseen infection prevention heroes.
Engineer Cindy Spangler compares canyoneering and surgery and identifies a common thread: the need for high-reliability processes. She describes how surgical time-out, a quick huddle to debrief before surgery, can serve as a useful model for reducing the risk of harm in canyoneering.
Teaching the next generation of health care providers happens every morning in 10 minute chunks throughout the hospital. The Surgical Intensive Care Unit reimagined the physician rounds to feature the patient’s nurse, instead of the patient’s physician-student. They found that this simple change created a stronger interprofessional team and advanced nursing practice.
Dr. Kyle Bradford Jones confronts a long-held cultural icon in medicine: the cowboy doctor. He argues that living up to the cowboy mythology undermines how physicians provide care – in trying to do it all, they actually do more harm. His cure for cowboy medicine? Relying on a great team.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
