Quoteworthy
We made productivity a religion and used social media to amplify our busy-ness.
Christian Sherwood

Most Recent
Block by Block: Building the Future Workforce

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.

Vision, Guardrails and Empowerment: Working in a Team of Teams Culture

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.

The Culture Advantage: How EVS Transformed Room Turn Time

Innovative teams solve problems by being curious, not by assigning blame. Environmental Services’ James Mwizerwa and Cooper Riley explain their deliberative approach to the long-standing and complex problem of getting inpatient rooms ready for the next patient.

Three Challenges for the Next Decade of Health Care

Patients will ask three things of us over the next decade of health care improvement: help me live my best life, make being a patient easier, and make care affordable. To meet those needs health care must shift—from organizing around a patient’s biology to understanding the patient’s biography.

The High Reliability Thanksgiving

Every year, Cindy Spangler hosts ‘Friendsgiving’ for over forty friends, family, and work colleagues. Cindy is also a senior value engineer and associate editor for Accelerate. So we asked: what is the process behind a successful Thanksgiving?

Don’t Let Metrics Undermine Your Purpose

Utah’s Chief Medical Quality Officer Bob Pendleton describes a strategic challenge faced by many industries, including health care. We are at risk for prioritizing achievement of metrics over our purpose. He challenges us to think beyond metrics to what patients actually need from us: patient-centered, outcome-focused, affordable care.

Chemotherapy Standardization: A Case Study in What it Takes to Design Safe Systems

Preventing medication errors often means using checklists and leveraging technology. But implementing these seemingly simple tools requires interdisciplinary teamwork, learning, and a commitment to ongoing verification that the process is working. Clinical operations nursing director Joy Lombardi describes how Huntsman Cancer Institute made chemotherapy highly reliable.

Value Week 2019: Daily Updates

Value Week is a unique collaborative event that brings together U of U Health’s improvement community to recognize the important and impactful work conducted throughout our organization.

How a Hospitalist Duo and a 1000-person Multidisciplinary Team Changed Practice

Changing practice is personal. It doesn’t happen through edict or mandate. Changing practice requires ongoing respectful dialogue. It requires clear vision, data-driven analysis and the support of a dedicated team. Changing practice takes longer that you think it will. In this example, we recognize the power of a partnership in this challenging and important work.

How the Cardiovascular Center is Implementing Patient Reported Outcomes

mEVAL is the system U of U Health uses to collect patient-reported outcomes (PROs). Of course, it’s what we do with the data that matters. mEVAL analytics team lead Josh Biber and cardiologist Josef Stehlik share how measuring PROs in the Cardiovascular Center is changing the ways clinicians treat and care for patients.

Do Discharge Prescriptions Correlate with Patient Needs?

General Surgery resident Josh Bleicher spent a year exploring opioid prescribing patterns in patients discharged after elective surgery. What did he find? We need a more patient-centered approach to opioid prescribing.

Diagnostic Error

A missed diagnosis can delay treatment or result in inappropriate treatment, causing unnecessary pain, suffering, and often financial hardship for our patients. Internist and hospitalist Peter Yarbrough helps explain why diagnostic errors happen with strategies to prevent them.