Balancing uncertainty, fear, and emotions isn’t easy — especially in health care. Family practice physician Kyle Bradford Jones looks outside of his practice to identify two common biases that affect how we behave in the face of perceived risk. His key insight? The risk that isn’t directly in front of us may be mistaken for no risk at all.
Just over one year ago, we launched Accelerate – University of Utah Health’s improvement community. Here are the “Top 3” articles from 2017 selected by the 16,673 members of our burgeoning community.
First came High Reliability Thanksgiving. Then High Reliability Camping. In keeping with the Lean holiday spirit, Accelerate’s Marcie Hopkins shares her method for high reliability gift wrapping — with a little help from our friends in Sterile Processing, who’ve perfected the envelope fold.
Managing patients’ expectations is often a euphemism for pragmatically preventing disappointment. But Melissa Briley, physician assistant at Redstone Health Center, integrates technology, teamwork, and clinic flow processes to reduce the uncertainty that comes from waiting for test results or instructions from a provider.
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.
Engineer Cindy Spangler compares canyoneering and surgery and identifies a common thread: the need for high-reliability processes. She describes how surgical time-out, a quick huddle to debrief before surgery, can serve as a useful model for reducing the risk of harm in canyoneering.
Teaching the next generation of health care providers happens every morning in 10 minute chunks throughout the hospital. The Surgical Intensive Care Unit reimagined the physician rounds to feature the patient’s nurse, instead of the patient’s physician-student. They found that this simple change created a stronger interprofessional team and advanced nursing practice.
Dr. Kyle Bradford Jones confronts a long-held cultural icon in medicine: the cowboy doctor. He argues that living up to the cowboy mythology undermines how physicians provide care – in trying to do it all, they actually do more harm. His cure for cowboy medicine? Relying on a great team.
The dojo welcomes guest author and senior value engineer Will McNett with a deep dive into clinic capacity utilization. McNett borrows from manufacturing to offer a framework to measure and increase what really matters to patients: time spent with their provider.
Zac Watne, Utah’s payment innovation manager (he gets paid to understand the volatile world of payment reform), is back with another update on “bundles.” In this post, Zac explains that while the latest news on bundles is important to know, it's much ado about nothing for University of Utah Health.
Chrissy Daniels shares three powerful insights from Dr. Danielle Ofri’s new book, “What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear.” Ofri combines research and storytelling to explain the power of patient-doctor conversation and the common pitfalls that undermine connection and trust. She concludes the ear may be the most powerful tool in medicine.
Using improvement methodology to solve one piece of America’s opioid epidemic. Dr. Sean Stokes and team used the practice of scoping to focus on one population and one procedure to achieve manageable, measurable improvement.
