In Ghana, Value Engineer Cindy Spangler, surgeons Kate Smiley and Marta McCrum found that patient safety rests on simple ideas that are hard in practice.

Organizing around patient needs isn’t easy. It involves changing traditional reporting relationships and patterns of care delivery. Over nearly 20 years, UNI’s HOME Program has refined how the team works together to deliver better care for some of our most vulnerable patients. Now the nation is learning from these frontline leaders.

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.”

What if a patient described their care team as “incredibly competent, experienced and collaborative”*? Those are the adjectives used by a patient to describe their surgery at South Jordan Health Center. As the nurse manager of South Jordan’s surgical services, Brent Klev works to ensure that every patient has that experience. Here, Klev shares three ways he fosters a culture of teamwork through shared purpose.

The Effective Communicator is back to answer your troublesome communication questions. This week: how to craft a compelling story.

Utah’s Chief Medical Quality Officer Dr. Bob Pendleton shares his sister's experience navigating cancer care and challenges the idea of what it means to be a doctor: What if we were committed to understanding what matters to our patients, and then we used that information to improve care?

Process mapping is easy. But also hard. This is a common conundrum with value improvement. Here's part 1 of 4, wherein rules are distinguished from guidance.

We asked Zac Watne, Utah’s payment innovation manager (he gets paid to understand the volatile world of payment reform) to give us a primer on “bundles.” Regardless of change happening in health care, thought leaders predict that payment reform, and specifically bundled payments, are here to stay. Why? Bundles deliver care with improved outcomes at a lower price all over the United States. In this post, Zac predicts the future of bundles.

It’s part 2 of 4 in our series on process mapping. This post is about the reasons to build a process map. They’re inexpensive and so very often bear fruit for your effort.

It’s the third consecutive post in the Dojo’s summer of process mapping. Today I discuss 4 common facilitation issues LSS practitioners can avoid prior to, and during a mapping effort.

It’s post 4 of 4 in the Dojo’s process mapping series, which means summer is almost over. Today’s post is a listicle of technical items to watch for in your process map.

The hard work of improving value includes leading and engaging a team. Two improvers, Emily Carlson and Dr. Lauren Wood, share how they kept their teams engaged throughout a long (and sometimes inconclusive) improvement process.