When health care is designed around patient needs, it doesn't just benefit the patient — it can also help providers find fulfillment in their work. But what does that look like in practice? Physician Joy English opened the Orthopaedic Injury Clinic, an innovative service that delivers better value to patients. Her success is a case study in how to achieve both provider and patient happiness.
Improvement work isn’t easy, especially when it attempts to address rising health care costs. Solid organ transplant coordinator Sharon Ugolini and her team led award-winning work implementing new protocols for common tests. That led to more than just reduced patient charges, though — ordering appropriate tests increases value and quality, as well.
Is zero possible? In the case of central line infections, the answer was once no. A CLABSI (central line associated blood stream infection) was once considered a car crash, or an expected inevitability of care. When University of Utah’s Burn Trauma Intensive Care Unit started treating CLABSIs like a plane crash, or a tragedy demanding in-depth investigation and cultural change, zero became possible.
Delivering a great health care experience is only possible with one crucial component: reliable scheduling. It’s such an essential part of efficient operations, in fact, that the University of Utah Health created an access optimization team to help providers across the system.
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.
What is the strongest predictor of an effective solution? It’s not the size of the committee or the length of the brainstorming session. The best predictor of successful solutions is how well the problem is understood. Investing time in defining, investigating and analyzing the problem can lead to transformative solutions.
Follow Utah’s Nutrition Care Services as they produce and deliver over 300 lunches to inpatients all over our hospital, all at the same time. The work of this exceptional team highlights a complex lean operation that—before now—has largely gone unseen.
1 in 3 healthcare dollars is paid for by the United States Health and Human Services, making them the largest payer in the United States. Chrissy Daniels shares this podcast that explains why HHS is changing and how Utah is keeping up.
Improving value in healthcare means redesigning care to meet patients’ needs. We must push ourselves beyond patient satisfaction surveys to reduce uncertainty, complexity, and confusion in the delivery of care. Matthew Stein, MD, and the Breast Imaging team unflinchingly faced a source of uncertainty for patients: waiting for mammogram results.
The following case study examines a new core competency in delivering value at a system level. At the University of Utah, leaders created integrated oncology teams organized for the patient. Collapsing historical silos and empowering front-line leaders grew adaptive teams that offered better value to cancer patients.
Chief Medical Officer of Press Ganey Tom Lee reminds us that value does not happen by accident, and good intentions are not enough. The goal of improving value has to be a major focus for everyone in an organization.
