Quoteworthy
Shared decision-making with patients, though often time-consuming, creates a checks-and-balances approach between patient and doctor to achieve a shared solution.
Kyle Bradford Jones

Most Recent
How Nurse-Physician Rounding = High-Performing Teams

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.

Wanted: “Teams” not “Cowboys"

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.

A Framework to Measure Value-added Time in Health Care

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.

A Post About Nothing (sort of)

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.

Is the Ear the Most Powerful Tool in Medicine?

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.

Dr. Sean Stokes on Improving Opioid Prescribing Patterns

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.

Can Netflix Help Us Choose a Physician?

Dr. Kyle Bradford Jones examines the Netflix algorithm for user preference as a model for developing provider selection tools that match patient values with their care needs.

"Call me Kate”: Safety Culture Lessons from Ghana

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.

How UNI HOME Program Integrated Care

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.

Candi's Story: When Health Care's Failings Hit Home

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?

Unraveling Reform: The Future of Bundled Payments

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.

The Two Rules of Process Mapping

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.