Rounding–the act of connecting with patients and staff–is a leadership best practice. While few find rounding easy to start, those who master it are hooked. It is a daily habit that improves patient care, experience and engages the team. Susan Clark and her medical director, Dr. Dana DeWitt, have taken the practice one step further by rounding together as a leadership dyad, resulting in a more connected and authentic team.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Trust. That’s what we want. We want to earn and keep the trust of every patient. We want them to trust that we provide the best possible medical care. But more than that, we want them to trust that we will respond to their needs, coordinate our efforts, and provide them with available options. We want them to trust that we will answer our phones, explain their treatment, and value their time. The exceptional patient experience is an enterprise-wide system designed to deliver a singular output: trust. And, this enterprise-wide system is built on trusting our providers and our teams.

There are two big buzzwords in healthcare – one is value-based care, and the other is population health. In this podcast, Chief Medical Quality Officer Bob Pendleton interviews Dr. Peter Weir. As executive medical director of population health, it's Dr. Weir's job to set the tone and direction for pop health, moving it from buzz to action. This is no small feat.

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.

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.

In addition to his day job as Director of ENT Clinics, Kirk Hughs orients all new specialty clinic and endoscopy employees to the Exceptional Patient Experience. His goal is to engage new team members about how they can create exceptional experiences for their patients.

Sarah Sherer is the Director of Employee Relations. We know her as the sounding board, place of last resort and coach for leaders throughout the organization. We asked her to share her wisdom on engaging employees of different ages. What she said might surprise you.

Not even the most gifted leader can lead change alone. No one person can come up with the strategy, communicate across the organization, eliminate all the barriers, and manage dozens of change initiatives. In order for transformation to succeed, you need a guiding coalition.