With thoughtful consideration of lessons learned from more than 20 years of nursing, nurse manager Shegi Thomas works to make life better for patients and staff. Along with opening our internal medicine unit 4 years ago, Shegi brings perspective from rehab, newborn intensive care, and from organizations like the WHO, to sum up a few leadership principles applicable to any team.
In 2011, Utah’s Intermediate Care Unit (IMCU) decided to improve patient safety through a new approach: engage the entire team in identifying and implementing the improvement. Clinical Operations Director Trell Inzunza shares the 4-step process that engaged the entire team to improve.
In her five years at University of Utah Health as hospitalist, educator, and medical director of AIM-A and WP5, Karli Edholm led amazing amounts of impactful work. She trained future leaders and improved the safety, experience, and cost of an inpatient stay. Here she shares her lessons for leading and staying focused on improvement: start with your own frustration.
You can only steer a ship if it’s moving. Leading successful change starts by first understanding your culture—then addressing deficits in a deliberate fashion. Senior value engineer Cindy Spangler introduces the Shingo Model, a principle-driven method to foster a healthy, adaptive, improvement-driven culture.
Teams naturally move through stages while working together but often get stuck or fail to reach their potential without recognition and leadership. Pharmacist Kyle Turner shares strategies for each stage of team development.
Follow Utah’s Nutrition Care Services as they produce and deliver over 300 lunches to inpatients all over our hospital, all at the same time. The work of this exceptional team highlights a complex lean operation that—before now—has largely gone unseen.
Sterile Processing runs a lean operation, delivering millions of instruments to University of Utah Health’s procedural teams. Director of value engineering Steve Johnson, assisted by the video wizardry of Charlie Ehlert, sheds light on our system’s unseen infection prevention heroes.
Visual cues in the workflow reduce cognitive load and help process stakeholders make the right decision. Steve Johnson interviews Dan Vargo in this Lean Behind the Scenes exclusive.
The sepsis case study focused on the leadership challenges faced by hospitalists Kencee Graves and Devin Horton. This post is about the project’s technical achievement using a process improvement principle. Our system taught Epic, Utah’s electronic medical record (EMR) how to provide urgent, life-saving information to clinicians.
Crisis requires new ways of doing things, but those who know how to double down on existing strengths thrive in complexity. Case manager Todd Selmer shares two tactics for managing change brought on by the coronavirus that have always served him well.
