The Lens
By Catalysis
The LensJul 12, 2021
93. Equity Panel
Julie King, who leads DEI efforts at Advocate Health Care in IL as well as DEI Learning and Education across the national Advocate Health enterprise, joins us to discuss equity in healthcare, as a continuation from the panel at the 2023 Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit.
92. Sal the Sepsis Sea Otter at Cook County
Dr. Erik Mikaitis, Dr. Katie Radigan, Dr. Joe Palter, Jennifer Rozenich, and Andrea Ramel, from Cook County Health in Chicago, describe the process and work they did in the last year to quickly identify and treat sepsis.
91. Modular Integration in Healthcare Facilities
Jenny Han, Director of Design Integration at The Boldt Company, shares about Boldt’s use of Lean in the development of their modular design healthcare units.
90. Using Appreciative Inquiry in Healthcare
Dr. Elizabeth Warner, Chief Medical Officer at Cherry Health in Michigan and author, joins us to describe the concept and practice of Appreciative Inquiry in healthcare.
89. UW Medicine Valley Medical Center Process Improvement Gold Star Program
Jamie Stillwill and Joell Teal, from the University of Washington – Valley Medical Center, share about their multi-tiered internal recognition program.
88. The Importance of Alignment in Healthcare
Joe Sluka and Dr. Jeff Absalon, from Level Zero, discuss alignment in healthcare organizations and the roles of the board, executive team, and physicians in cultivating this alignment.
87. Preventing Harm through Root Cause Analysis
Molly Rank and David Allison, former staff at Peace Health discuss preventing harm through root cause analysis (RCA) and examine the link between RCA and an organization’s Lean Improvement Strategy.
86. The Mistakes that Make Us
Mark Graban joins us to talk about his book, The Mistakes that Make Us, which focuses on how to learn from mistakes and create a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.
85. The Better Care Plan
Dr. John Toussaint, Catalysis’ Executive Board Chair and Steve Shortell, Co-Founder of the Center for Lean Engagement and Research (CLEAR) at the University of California – Berkley, join us to discuss the content of the article they helped write, "The Better Care Plan: A Blueprint for Improving America’s Healthcare System." This article explores how to transition the current fee-for-service system in America to a risk-adjusted payment system with increased transparency on performance to continuously improve outcomes.
84. Making Change Stick
Amy Mervak and Mike Radtke, faculty of the workshop, Making Change Stick, focus on the many hidden factors that can be barriers to individual and organizational change efforts, how to make these factors visible, and address them.
83. Community Health Network RCA Process
Ginger Breeck, Executive Director of Patient Safety & Experience at the Community Health Network in Indiana, shares about Community Health's work to develop a strong and supportive process for Root Cause Analysis, or RCA.
82. Spreading Learning in Nigeria
Adam Thompson and Aisha Amira Saidu, of EHA Clinics in Nigeria, Africa share how they are using a variety of non-traditional resources to encourage everyone in their organization to see themselves as part of improvement and lean.
81. The Lean Management System in Action
Pam Helander, Catalysis faculty, shares about the pilot workshop, Lean Management System in Action, that Catalysis held at Mount Sinai Morningside in New York City.
80. University Emergency Department Redesign
Todd Fischer, Ian Wedgwood, Ken Shanahan, and Krystal Cassanelli from the University Campus of UMass Memorial Health describe the redesign of their Emergency Department (ED) to streamline the flow for patient discharge.
79. UW Medicine, Valley Medical Center Improvement Idea Program
Jamie Stilwill and Kristine Nicholson, from the University of Washington, Valley Medical Center in Renton, Washington, share about their Improvement idea program that has been in place for 6 years.
78. Transitioning to healthcare improvement from other industries
Kim Keller, Mary Ghaly Akella, and Shelcy Kamrud, from Mount Sinai Morningside, join us to share about their experiences transitioning to healthcare from continuous improvement roles within other industries.
77. Digital Integration and Workflow Design
Elizabeth Howe, Director of Performance Excellence at Duke University Health System in North Carolina, explains the process that Duke followed to introduce a Workflow Redesign and Digital Integration as part of their Digital Front Door to streamline the patient intake process.
76. A Long Transformational Journey at Trinity Muscatine
Hear from Glenda Reichert, a Performance Improvement Analyst with UnityPoint Health at Trinity in Muscatine, Iowa, who has been part of the Catalysis community for many years. Glenda shares about how Trinity continues to review and apply shared learnings from Catalysis in their work.
75. Hosting a Gemba Visit
Rachel DeMaster, Director, Care Improvement & Innovation and Kristy Consoli, Administrative Specialist, Care Improvement and Innovation Services from Montage Health located in Monterey, CA join us to talk about their experience and learnings from hosting a recent Gemba visit for fellow Catalysis Healthcare Value Network members.
74. Critical Pathways
Kellie Olmstead, Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer at Nemours Children's Health in Jacksonville, Florida joins us to describe the Clinical Pathways improvement work and progress made at Nemours.
73. Getting the Board Involved
John Toussaint, MD, Executive Chairman of the Catalysis Board of Directors, explains the importance of healthcare organizations engaging the Board of Directors in improvement work.
72. Daily Management System Spread and Sustainment
How do you spread and sustain improvement work as an organization? Being able to successfully respond to this challenge is vital to an organization’s success. In this episode we are joined by Kim Keller, Mary Ghaly Akella, and Shelcy Kamrud, from Mount Sinai Morningside, one of our Catalysis Healthcare Value Network members, to discuss their approach and experience implementing a Daily Management System.
This team will also be teaching a Pre-Summit workshop “Prioritize Your Process: Tactics to Improve, Spread and Sustain Daily Management” at our annual Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit in Chicago this June. To learn more about their workshop, visit createvalue.org/summit.
71. Innovative Problem Solving through Collaboration
Effective problem solving is foundational in a culture of continuous improvement. Today we are joined by Catalysis faculty member, Jenn Christison, to hear about the role collaboration plays in supporting more innovative problem solving. Jenn will delve even further into this topic during her Pre-Summit workshop “Engaging Your Teams in Collaborative Process Design” in Chicago this June. Please go to createvalue.org/summit to learn more.
70. Helsinki University Hospital – Self-Assessment Instrument
Elina Reponen, MD, Ph.D., Chief Anesthesiologist at the Helsinki University Hospital, shares with us about her experience in Finland using the self-assessment instrument for Lean implementation in a healthcare system that was developed by CLEAR (the Center for Lean Engagement and Research).
69. Addressing Discharge Barriers at UMass
Kevin Reynolds, Radiology Technologist and Senior Clinical Quality Manager, and Liz Trumble, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt with the Center for Innovation and Transformational Change, from UMass Memorial Health discuss their improvement work on patient discharge barriers. For additional information, see their recently published white paper "Discharge Barriers Escalation (Radiology): Easy Access to Information and EHR Messaging Platform Reduce Discharge Delays" on createvalue.org under Resources and White Papers.
68. Reflections on Lean in Healthcare: Insights for the Future
Dr. Lisa Yerian, a Surgical Pathologist and Chief Improvement Officer at the Cleveland Clinic shares her thoughts about the impact of lean in healthcare.
67. Learning Lean Implementation in Healthcare
Donna Litwinski, Executive Director of the Lean Resource Office with the Memorial Care Health System in Fountain Valley, California shares some of her reflections on improvement and what she sees ahead.
66. Objectives and Key Results
Sarah Sydlowski, Associate Chief Improvement Officer, and Melissa Vandergriff, Continuous Improvement Director from the Cleveland Clinic join us to share about the value and use of Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs.
65. How to Translate New Learnings to Actionable Plans
Alli Kulp, Todd Schneider, and Emily Swaney join us from OhioHealth, one of our Catalysis Healthcare Value Network member organizations. They took the opportunity to send a group to the 2022 Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit and share about the process they created to categorize and prioritize their team’s takeaways and learnings to ensure they got the most out of the event.
64. Reflections on a Career of Improvement
Walter Bilgram, the now retired former Vice President of Operational Excellence at BJC Healthcare in Missouri shares his thoughts and reflections on his career and over 30 years of work in quality and improvement.
63. Psychological Barriers to Problem-Solving and Agility in Healthcare
Dr. Pierre-Luc Fournier, Professor of Operations Management at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, and a contributor to our partner CLEAR (the Center for Lean Engagement and Research) at the University of California – Berkley School of Public Health, shares about the results of a study done on the psychological barriers to problem-solving and agility in healthcare.
62. New Care Model Development
Pete Knox and Ted Toussaint from Prospect3 share about their work with health system leaders to accelerate their journey to population health by redesigning primary care and building internal capability for redesign and new care model development.
61. Closing the Loop at Intermountain Healthcare
Matt Pollard, a former ER doctor and now Vice President of Continuous Improvement at Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City discusses the importance of closing the loop and constant diligence in maintaining and examining your systems to keep them moving forward.
60. UMass Memorial’s Operating Room Preference Card Optimization Project
We hear from the team from UMass Memorial Health System about their operating room preference cards improvement project.
59. Lean Management IS your Quality-PI-Safety-Risk Management Program
Dr. Lee Erickson, Senior VP & Chief Quality Officer with Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts shares about Integrated Daily Management Systems and Tiered huddles and how they are all interconnected to improve all outcomes.
58. How to Build a Better Boat and Keep it Afloat
We are joined by Jeannine Grinnell, CEO of UW Medicine – Valley Medical Center, who presented a keynote at the 2022 Catalysis Lean Healthcare Summit, sharing about their journey and work to “build a better boat.”
57. Adapting Huddles for a Hybrid Remote World
Daily huddles are an important element in a lean management system. Shelcy Kamrud and Natalie Bergstrom, from Mount Sinai Morningside, share with us about how they implemented and adapted their daily huddle standard to their Patient Care Liaison team, virtually.
56. Adding a Higher Tiered Non-Clinical Huddle
Kim Brown and Beau Gostomsky, from Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, join us to talk about how they have implemented and learned from huddles for Shared Services leaders.
55. Learnings from Using Leader Standard Work
Dr. Mike Conroy, Chief Medical Officer for Sutter Medical Group in Sacramento, shares how he uses leader standard work and what he has learned. Leader standard work has been a big topic of conversation throughout the Catalysis community because it helps us stay focused on what matters most.
54. How a Buddy System Supports Personal Development
Don Shilton, Executive Coach with Catalysis, explains how healthcare executives he is coaching have been utilizing a buddy system to help them with personal development.
53. What the RaDonda Vaught Case Teaches Us About Culture’s Influence on Patient Safety
We are joined by Ken Segel from Value Capture, to reflect on the impact of RaDonda Vaught’s conviction on healthcare. Ken co-authored an article with John Toussaint, “4 Actions to Reduce Medical Errors in US Hospitals,” that was recently published in Harvard Business Review.
52. Using the Model Cell Approach to Lean Implementation
Model cells are test centers in an organization to experiment with new ideas and provide the opportunity to showcase what’s possible to the rest of the organization. Julie Williams, Operational Innovation Specialist at Nebraska Methodist Health System, shares with us about the model cell work they have done at Methodist Health System.
51. Avoiding the Plan-Do-Study-Abandon Cycle
Mike Radtke, Catalysis faculty, talks with us about effective coaching and experimentation in problem solving.
50. How to Align People in Your Organization with Top Priorities to Create Patient Value
Strategy is about making choices to create unique and relevant value for patients under conditions of uncertainty and competition. Making choices reduces overburden. Following the voice of the customer creates a unique, differentiated value proposition. Aligning resources around the top priorities reduces confusion. And the use of rapid learning cycles in the deployment of those priorities enables organizational agility. A system using visual management and standard work compels people at every level in the organization to contribute to the most important priorities as defined by patients. Jeff Hunter discusses using visual management of strategy deployment.
49. Using Kata to Engage Team Members
Kata is a pattern or routine that serves as a guide to proficiency and expertise. Bill Boyd, Catalysis faculty, explains the use of kata in healthcare and how it engages team members in rapid cycles of experimentation.
48. How Coaching Can Support Culture Transformation
As your organization matures on the journey to organizational excellence the function of the improvement team evolves from project-based facilitation to supporting leaders through culture transformation. Today I am joined by Catalysis staff and faculty to discuss the importance of building coaching capability within your PI team.
If you are looking to develop you coaching skills check out our virtual workshop, Building Coaching Capabilities: Transforming Your Improvement Team at createvaleu.org/coachingcapabilities or check out our full list of upcoming workshops at createvalue.org/workshops.
47. Value-based Care in the Home and Community
In the last two years, healthcare delivery has gone through a significant evolution. Telehealth services that were once rare, became the predominant method. In addition, with the growth of technology, other work is being done to deliver care at home or outside of the traditional setting of a hospital or clinic. We are joined by Patrick Conway, the CEO of Care Solutions at Optum to talk about this innovative work to provide patient care.
46. Improving Outcomes Using Data
Data is important to driving improvement work. It is not always easy to access the right information or to analyze it in a way that can be used to create real, sustainable change. In 2019, Dr. Dan Low, from Seattle Children’s Hospital, presented a learning session on how they were using data to improve outcomes. He joins us on the podcast to discuss how every patient can make the system smarter when it comes to data collection.
45. Innovation at Akron Children’s Hospital
Stefan Agamanolis, Chief Innovation Officer, and Mike Antochow, Operational Excellence and Innovation Leader, from Akron Children’s Hospital talk about work in their Innovation Center. Akron Children’s Hospital is a member of the Catalysis Healthcare Value Network and recently shared a case study about work in a sharing session open to other members.
44. The Impact of Leader Standard Work
Trevor Hall, Vice President of Human Resources, Communications, Continuous Improvement and Appeals at Saskatchewan Workers’ Compensation Board, talks about the value of leader standard work, specifically the impact of leader standard work when starting a new role.