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.
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.
Zac Watne returns to answer another variation of the all-too-familiar question: Why is health care so hard to understand? In this post, Zac unravels the bureaucratic and economic transactions that make up the whole health care enchilada.
Chief Medical Quality Officer Bob Pendleton kicks off our week-long celebration of improvement and community during University of Utah Health Value Week.
Senior Value Engineer Luca Boi applies the Lean concept of waste to health care and explains how learning to see the “Seven Wastes” can help focus your efforts.
Whether it means patients’ “experience”, patients’ “satisfaction” or “patient-centered”, service reflects the patients’ perspective.
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.
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.
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.
Visual cues in the workflow reduce cognitive load and help process stakeholders make the right decision. Steve Johnson interviews Dan Vargo in this Lean Behind the Scenes exclusive.
Medical errors often occur due to system failure, not human failure. Hospitalist Kencee Graves helps explain why we need to evaluate medical error from a system standpoint.
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.
