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Exceptional Patient Experience: An Ideal Worth Striving For

Director of Patient Experience Mari Ransco and Chief Medical Officer of Ambulatory Health Richard Orlandi give a primer on the future of exceptional patient experience at University of Utah Health.

What is “Service” in Health Care?

Whether it means patients’ “experience”, patients’ “satisfaction” or “patient-centered”, service reflects the patients’ perspective.

How the Cardiovascular Center is Implementing Patient Reported Outcomes

mEVAL is the system U of U Health uses to collect patient-reported outcomes (PROs). Of course, it’s what we do with the data that matters. mEVAL analytics team lead Josh Biber and cardiologist Josef Stehlik share how measuring PROs in the Cardiovascular Center is changing the ways clinicians treat and care for patients.

How Sue Childress Creates a Culture of Innovation

As the director of nursing at Huntsman Cancer Hospital, Sue Childress shares her passion for improvement with a team of hundreds of nurses and HCAs. Learn how a cape and hat inspired Childress’ nursing career, and a passion for cultivating innovation.

Want To Reduce Burnout? Focus on Autonomy and Community

University of Utah Health’s best thinkers came together to tackle a major problem: burnout. Last year, 40 teams across the health system took on the challenge as part of the Resiliency Center’s Wellness Champion Poster Session. The results? Fulfilling basic needs like scheduling autonomy, being heard, and building a community all make a big difference.

Do Discharge Prescriptions Correlate with Patient Needs?

General Surgery resident Josh Bleicher spent a year exploring opioid prescribing patterns in patients discharged after elective surgery. What did he find? We need a more patient-centered approach to opioid prescribing.

How Rethinking Teamwork Transformed Discharge

Thinking about teams differently did more than improve our inpatient discharge process. It gave everyone a shared vision: every single patient in the right bed, at the right time. Patients now leave the hospital earlier, all while monthly discharges have increased. Tracey Nixon, director of capacity management, shares how they did it.

How to Serve Others and Still Lead

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.

Coping With Complexity: The Value of Palliative Care

Palliative care teams focus on treating the symptoms and stress of serious illness. Nate Wanner, Associate Medical Director of U of U Health’s Palliative Care Program, discusses how palliative care not only improves the quality of a patient’s life, but supports other clinical teams in one of the most challenging (and rewarding) parts of caring for people: having hard conversations.

The SMART Way To Set Your New Year's Resolutions

Can improvement science help with New Year’s resolutions? Try using this handy SMART goal generator to create concrete, clearly defined SMART goals to set yourself up for success.

Workplace Challenge: Is It a Culture or Technology Problem?

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.

Accelerate 2018: By The Numbers

Over two years ago, we launched Accelerate–University of Utah Health’s learning community. It has been rewarding, inspiring, and fun to share Utah’s work with nearly 50,000 readers, some of them from across the world. Everybody loves a year-end list, so here are Accelerate’s awards for 2018.