Finding the time to teach in busy clinical environments can be challenging. Clinician educators Kathleen Timme and Pete Hannon outline a process for precepting in five minutes or less.

The Effective Communicator spoke with Tom Miller, Utah’s Chief Medical Officer, about respectful communication in the workplace. His tips? Go slow, set boundaries, and pick up the phone. Bonus: why he uses Emojis in text messages.

Alison Flynn Gaffney defines herself as a servant leader. As U of U Health’s Executive Director of Service Lines, Ancillary and Support Services, she brings more than two decades of experience in strategic, operations, and consulting roles at academic medical centers and community hospitals. Here are Alison’s expert tips for effective servant leadership.

The pace of technological progress can make it seem like solutions to our health care problems are only a click away. Howard Weeks, Utah’s interim chief medical information officer, lauds the virtues of technology with this caveat: you can’t IT your way out of every problem.

Revenue Cycle Support Services is the backbone of Utah’s financial system – from insurance prior authorizations to processing billions of dollars in claims and payments. Their leadership team, led by administrative director Kathy Delis, has been on a years-long journey to make this work better both for patients and employees. Here, she shares how she brought meaning, purpose, and a sense of community to the team.

Kyle Bradford Jones returns with a review of “Quiet,” Susan Cain’s book about the power of introverted thinking. Although introversion is often viewed as a drawback — “a second-class personality trait,” Cain writes — Bradford Jones believes that reassessing his personality type has helped him better understand himself, his co-workers, and even his patients.

In the new series Book Club for Busy People, Accelerate shares highlights of books we’re hearing about from the community. First up: how thinking about others’ needs strengthens teams and increases civility in The Outward Mindset.

The Effective Communicator returns this week to remedy the bane of our existences: endless, often pointless, meetings. Yes, you can run them better.

Drawing from psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s Elephant and the Rider metaphor, Utah's Chief Medical Quality Officer Bob Pendleton explains why emotions are critical to motivating change in health care. Behavioral economics, it appears, may provide the direction we need.

University of Utah Health was an early adopter of bundled payments. Accelerate’s Mari Ransco sat down with Ryan VanderWerff, one of the first in our health system to participate in payment innovation, to learn firsthand what it takes to lead a team in turbulent times.

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.

We begin every Accelerate interview by asking about a person’s intrinsic motivation to work in health care, lead a team, or make a change. In other words, we always start with “why.”