Quoteworthy
Change in the workplace, be that health care or IT, happens by focusing on building a community where people can be themselves—especially those people who may not have had the same privileges that I’ve had.
Maia Hightower

Most Recent
What Goldilocks Can Teach You About Problem Statements

Internal medicine residents Brian Sanders and Matt Christensen team up with senior value engineer Luca Boi to explain why investing your time honing a well-defined problem statement can pay dividends later in the ultimate success of a QI project.

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.

Standard Work

Standard work is the most efficient way to accomplish a job quickly and accurately supported by visual guides. VA internist Sarah Hall and nurse practitioner Jamie Clinton-Lont team up with senior value engineer Luca Boi to share how they used standard work to make pain management safer for veterans.

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.

Lean Tips for Holiday Pie Making

Every Thanksgiving, Accelerate’s Marcie Hopkins makes not just one, but multiple pies to enjoy. To maximize efficiency, she teamed up with Farmington manager Matt Sanford to design the perfect process. And—of course—there’s a health care application as well.

How to Conduct a Rapid Critical Appraisal

Performing a rapid critical appraisal helps evaluate a study for its worth by ensuring validity, meaningful data, and significance to the patient. Contributors Barb Wilson, Mary Jean Austria, and Tallie Casucci share a checklist of questions to complete a rapid critical appraisal efficiently and effectively.

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.