Quoteworthy
Understanding the perspectives of people we serve is paramount for successful interventions. Without knowing a patient's values, feelings, and environmental and social challenges, a team is unable to adequately create solutions that meaningfully and wholly address the problem.
Marlana Li, Tiffany Weber, Peter Hannon, Ibrahim Hammad, Brian Good, Rachel Bonnett, Candace Chow, Sara Lamb, and Jorie Colbert-Getz

Most Recent
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.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

It’s been almost three years since Accelerate began (wow!). We thought it was a good time for an update. If you've been here before, you'll see that we’ve made changes to the site based directly on your feedback. Here we share how we've improved the site. Thank you for sharing your opinions, and keep them coming!

Time For Change: How Reexamining Practice Improved Length of Stay in Labor and Delivery

Improvement isn’t just for one area of academic medicine. The right improvement can mean improved patient and trainee experience, reduced cost and a more engaged staff. Nurse Manager Bernice Tenort, physician Brett Einerson, and an interdisciplinary team ended up solving many challenges by tackling a long-standing problem: wait time in labor and delivery.

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.

Team, Process, and Purpose: Best of the Posters 2019

Chief Medical Quality Officer Bob Pendleton kicks off our week-long celebration of improvement and community during University of Utah Health Value Week.

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.

The Seven Wastes in Health Care

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.

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.

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.

How Sue Childress Creates a Culture of Innovation

As the director of nursing at Huntsman Cancer Hospital, Sue Childress shares her passion for improvement with a team of hundreds of nurses and HCAs. Learn how a cape and hat inspired Childress’ nursing career, and a passion for cultivating innovation.

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.