The Lens

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...

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...

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). 

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 Info...

Dr. Lisa Yerian, a Surgical Pathologist and Chief Improvement Officer at the Cleveland Clinic shares her thoughts about the impact of lean 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We hear from the team from UMass Memorial Health System about their operating room preference cards improvement project.

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. 

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mike Radtke, Catalysis faculty, talks with us about effective coaching and experimentation in problem solving.

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...

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.

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 virt...