Senior Value Engineer Luca Boi translates Lean lessons in culture building from Hollywood’s big screen to our everyday lives.

Psychological safety is crucial for the medical field to innovate and improve. Teams must feel safe and open to expressing concerns and reporting errors. Psychiatrists Jennifer O’Donohoe and Kristi Kleinschmit share tips to create a more psychologically safe environment for your team.

Creating a better experience for everyone—patients, staff, providers—takes consistency and small actions. For years, University of Utah Health’s Redstone Health Center in Park City has been amongst the top performers in the nation for patient experience. Long-time operations manager Pati Colvin and nursing supervisor Teresa Stone share the secrets to their years at the top. Spoiler alert—it's deliberate small steps.

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.

The much-anticipated Covid-19 vaccine has arrived. We can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, but now we’re facing another challenge: How do we get there? Geriatric’s Alison Schlisman and Family Medicine’s Bernadette Kiraly share local best practices supported by CDC insights to build vaccine confidence with patients.

In this new miniseries director of patient safety Iona Thraen examines our safety and quality improvement efforts through the clarifying lens of our coronavirus response. Part 1 focuses on patient-centered care and patient safety and proves just how much patient safety is embedded in our culture.

“This is why I went into medicine—to talk to my patients and show them humanity.” In the rapid day-to-day clinical setting, that’s harder to find. Utah Advanced Communication Training (UACT) provides practical tools to enhance patient and peer interactions.

Finding evidence to change the status quo isn’t easy; thinking about evidence in terms of how it persuades—whether subjective or objective—can make it easier. Plastic surgery resident Dino Maglić and his colleagues followed their guts and saved money by improving the laceration trays used to treat patients in the emergency department.

Telecommuting is a novel work mode for many of us in health care. Veteran telecommuter Christian Sherwood shares her tips for navigating the uncharted waters of taking our work and teams offsite.

What does it mean to take a system approach to problems? The discipline to learn as a team, patience to wade through hundreds of cases, and a diversity of perspectives. Utah’s Critical Care Senior Nursing Director Colleen Connelly, System Quality, Patient Safety, and Value Senior Director Sandi Gulbransen, and Associate Chief Medical Quality Officer Kencee Graves reflect on what they’ve learned by studying system problems with an interdisciplinary team.

Some challenges are so big you have to think in terms of evolution, not solution, to tackle them. Director of Strategy and Workforce Planning (GME) Sri Koduri explains how academic health systems can weather strong and weak labor markets alike by building sustainable bridges between clinical and academic communities.

In this provocative thought piece, hospitalists and system leaders Kencee Graves and Bob Pendleton explain the “team of teams” approach to becoming more nimble, responsive, and adaptable to the demands of our changing world.