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
Exceptional Patient Experience: An Ideal Worth Striving For

Director of Patient Experience Mari Ransco and Chief Medical Officer of Ambulatory Health Richard Orlandi give a primer on the future of exceptional patient experience at University of Utah Health.

To Improve, Be Patient and "Care a Whole Awful Lot"

General Surgery resident Riann Robbins is on a journey to reduce unnecessary tests. She recently shared her team's work to tackle ABG testing in critical care at the annual Department of Surgery Value Symposium. What did she learn? Be patient and persistent. As Seuss said, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

Systems Approach to Error

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.

The Hard Work of Health Care Certainty

University of Utah Health’s success is driven by teams doing the right work for our patients — and sharing that work across the system. Chief Medical Quality Officer Bob Pendleton reflects on the universal importance of continuous improvement while looking at health care through the eyes of a patient.

How Burn Clinic Implemented Patient Reported Outcomes

Including patients in treatment planning improves their experience, and patient reported outcomes (PROs) offer new ways to do just that — talking with patients about how treatment impacts their daily life. Clinical Nurse Coordinator Lisa McMurtrey shares the Burn Clinic team’s award-winning work implementing PROs during patient visits without disrupting flow.

Spend Time Thinking Slow

Kyle Bradford Jones is back, this time with a deep dive into decision-making. Jones uses psychology to explain why it takes so long to adopt new evidence into our clinical practice and argues that we need to actively schedule time together in order to reflect.

The Science of Scheduling

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.

Celebrate Signal, Drown Out Noise

To celebrate the New Year, Value Engineer Mitch Cannon applied statistics to weight loss. He was quickly reminded of an important lesson that applies in health care: when you’re trying to improve, don’t overreact to data.

How to Avoid Two Common Biases

Balancing uncertainty, fear, and emotions isn’t easy — especially in health care. Family practice physician Kyle Bradford Jones looks outside of his practice to identify two common biases that affect how we behave in the face of perceived risk. His key insight? The risk that isn’t directly in front of us may be mistaken for no risk at all.

Holiday Gift Wrapping the High Reliability Way

First came High Reliability Thanksgiving. Then High Reliability Camping. In keeping with the Lean holiday spirit, Accelerate’s Marcie Hopkins shares her method for high reliability gift wrapping — with a little help from our friends in Sterile Processing, who’ve perfected the envelope fold.

Reasons to Build a Process Map

It’s part 2 of 4 in our series on process mapping. This post is about the reasons to build a process map. They’re inexpensive and so very often bear fruit for your effort.

Common Facilitation Challenges When Process Mapping

It’s the third consecutive post in the Dojo’s summer of process mapping. Today I discuss 4 common facilitation issues LSS practitioners can avoid prior to, and during a mapping effort.