Quoteworthy
What you put out to the world comes back to you. It’s important that I’m a better version of myself than I was yesterday. At the end of each day, when I look back and think about the struggles and mistakes and difficult decisions, one thing I’ll never regret is being kind.
Jess Rivera

Most Recent
Making Valuable Work Visible

Vascular surgeon Brigitte Smith is about to start her second year leading a value improvement curriculum for surgery residents. She believes you can’t be a great provider until you’re ready to lead a team to improve care delivery. Here, Smith shares the importance of recognition in motivating residents (and their teams) to learn to improve.

Is It Better To Have An MVP or A MVT (most valuable team)?

Dr. Kyle Bradford Jones is back, this time with baseball analogies. Team success means having a team of contributors instead of one MVP. Jones writes that specific factors—positivity and team identity—are critical to nurturing a successful team.

Teamwork Must-have: Compelling Vision

Accelerate frequently chronicles the hard work of building and nurturing teams because we believe that real teams are the antidote to the chaos of modern medicine (in the words of Dr. Tom Lee). Here, we highlight a necessary ingredient of high-performing teams: compelling vision.

Cynthia McComber’s Antidote to Uncertainty

Positive beliefs build energy, caring and creativity and can increase resilience and influence bottom line results.* As senior director of endoscopy, medical and specialty clinics, Cynthia McComber believes that meaning is necessary for leading change. McComber talked with Accelerate’s Chrissy Daniels about how to build connected, authentic and resilient teams.

A New Kind of Great Save: Value Improvement Leadership

We all love the “great save” stories. But heroism in the context of health care improvement isn’t always so exciting. When you’re pursuing more reliable, more patient-centered, and more affordable health care, providers have to rely on a different kind of gratification.

The Wisdom of Crowds: Effective Feedback

Want to be part of a thriving culture? Feedback is key. Director of ENT and dental clinics Kirk Hughs asked over 500 University of Utah Health leaders to share what makes feedback effective. Their top two? Timely and sincere feedback.

Eight Behaviors to Cultivate Trust

Employees in high-trust organizations are happier, more collaborative and stay at their jobs longer. But what builds long-term, sustaining trust? Director of strategic initiatives Chrissy Daniels highlights findings from an article in Harvard Business Review. The answer: Eight behaviors.

The Bobcast with Dr. Mark Eliason

Chief Medical Quality Officer interviews Dr. Mark Eliason, Department of Dermatology’s chief value officer. Dr. Eliason talks about what he has learned about engaging the entire team in improvement and how he is trying to make the clinical lives of dermatologists a bit easier.

Utah's Resident Expert Hailey Bandy Explains "Repeal and Replace"

The process to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is confusing to say the least. That’s why we're lucky to have Hailey Bandy as an interpreter. As Associate General Counsel, she watches health care policy and analyzes its impact on U of U Health. Medical Group contributor Isaac Holyoak interviewed Bandy about the big changes afoot.

What I'm Reading: What Health Care Can Learn from Google

Chief Pharmacy Officer Linda Tyler thinks broadly about the leadership skills needed to deliver reliably safe care. Here, she shares an article about the importance of psychological safety—the #1 success factor identified by Google’s Project Aristotle, which studied hundreds of Google’s teams to figure out why some stumbled and some soared.

Top 5 "Whys" of 2016

We believe that improvement in healthcare needs more connection to what makes this hard work meaningful. That’s why we ask every person who contributes to Accelerate – how did you get into healthcare? There are easier jobs out there, so what keeps you here? Here are a few of our favorite answers.

The Bobcast with Dr. Brigitte Smith

In this podcast, Utah’s Chief Medical Quality Officer interviews Brigitte Smith. A vascular surgeon who joined the University of Utah in 2015, Dr. Smith has quickly become a thought leader in transforming training for future physicians in value (both medical school and residency programs). Their conversation pinpoints an inconvenient truth—we may be a generation away from a culture of value-driven healthcare.