Quoteworthy
What teaming means to me is creating a learning environment where you can make mistakes, pick yourself back up and keep trying to get better. It’s the ability for a group of people to tackle a problem together in a safe-to-fail environment.
Tracey Nixon

Most Recent
Four Leadership Lessons Medical School Didn’t Teach Me

When dermatologist Dr. Stephanie Klein proposed a clinic for urgent skin care needs, she thought it would be easy. Reserve the clinic rooms, schedule the appointments—done! She quickly found out that moving from idea to reality would require leadership skills that she hadn’t been taught in medical training and ten years of practice. Accelerate’s Mari Ransco found out how Klein transformed from busy clinician to leader.

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.

Building a Real Team With Trust

According to Melissa Horn, changing a culture takes three years. She would know. Melissa has had the unusual leadership challenge of being “the fixer” for four different clinics at University of Utah Health as director of outpatient women’s clinics. Accelerate learned how Melissa creates authentic teams (hint: it’s hard work and there are no shortcuts).

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.

How Utah Builds Trust With Patient Experience

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.

Is a Master of Culture Administration (MCA) the New MBA?

What is the most important skill that health care leaders need? According to a recent NEJM Catalyst survey, it's building culture. But what are "culture skills" and how does one actually build them? Chrissy Daniels curates culture lessons from Accelerate case studies and finds that, although our business school doesn't currently offer the MCA, when they do, we will have faculty ready to teach.

Practicing (Episode 2): Brad Wiggins and Dr. Steve Morris

Real teams are the antidote to the chaos of modern medicine. “Real teams know each other, feel loyalty to one another, trust one another, and would not want to disappoint one another” (Tom Lee, NEJM Catalyst 2016). Practicing are conversations between real team members about why the work matters. Our goal is to preserve and share the stories of the teams at University of Utah Healthcare.

The Bobcast with Dr. Rob Glasgow

In this podcast, our Chief Medical Quality Officer interviews Dr. Rob Glasgow, department of surgery's vice chair of clinical operations and chief value officer. Dr. Glasgow shares how the concept of value transformation provided a clear pathway to build a career that is aligned with why he went into medicine in the first place.

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.

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.