The Lens

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...

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 wh...

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.

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.

We are joined by a team of nurses and CI staff from Michigan Medicine to discuss how they have been using process observation, or process confirmation as they like to call it, as a tool for problem-solving within their management system.

Dr. Dorothy Hung, Ph. D., Director of the Center for Lean Engagement & Research at the University of California - Berkley (CLEAR) joins The Lens  to discuss recent research CLEAR completed through interviews with healthcare leaders on the benefits of using a Daily Management System during the pandemic. CLEAR is a partner of Catalysis in providing objective academic research in the applica...

Michele Smith, Catalysis Faculty, shares practical concepts that can help you develop as a leader in a continuous improvement environment.

Aditi Patil, Catalysis faculty member, shares how to engage people through communication by using a storytelling approach. This approach is a powerful way to influence and connect people throughout an organizational transformation.

A team from Torrance Memorial Medical Center to talk about improvement work done around bed capacity.

Ryan Haley, Senior Director of Ambulatory Services at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center was instrumental in developing and establishing the mass vaccination facility in Columbus, Ohio. Specifically, they set up in the Schottenstein Center, a 20,000 seat arena in Columbus. An important part of operating effectively was visual management and cues for those staffing the workflow.

New care model development requires investment in planning for the future where care needs may look very different than they currently do to stay relevant. This week we will share an excerpt from Anita Iyenger, Chief Strategy Officer at Legacy Health, discussing her organizational and personal leadership experiences around leading and managing deep and lasting change including developing new care...

It’s not uncommon to see regression after process changes have been implemented. It is important to understand why this is occurring and mitigate those issues. Catalysis Healthcare Value Network member organization, Children’s Mercy Kansas City has shared their improvement work in many ways, including at the Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit and Network Sharing Sessions. This episode features...

How do you create an organization where everyone is continuously learning, improving, and remaining committed to its purpose every day? Leaders from various industries including healthcare, information technology, manufacturing, and finance are constantly searching for the answer to this question. Laurie Spadaro, Director, MBOE, Fisher College of Business Executive Education, joins us to talk abou...

Peter Ward, Director, Center for Operational Excellence, discusses how lean thinking helped with establishing mass vaccination sites in metro areas across the country. As well as how this thinking translated in the transition to smaller vaccination sites after the initial rush.

Today we have a special treat for our listeners. We will be sharing a segment of the PI leader discussion panel from our Summit in June. The panel features Penny Iannelli from UMass Memorial Health Care, Carlos Scholz from The Permanente Medical Group, and Yvett Sena from UNM Health System. The session is moderated by my colleague, Chris Weisbrod. These improvement leaders share insights about the...

Kellie Olmstead, Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer at Nemours shares about how they utilized multiple aspects of the management system in defining as well as deploying their strategic plan.

In this episode, we discuss building the foundation for lean transformation with Tom Hartman, Executive Coach at Catalysis and former senior executive at Autoliv, the world’s largest manufacturer of automotive safety products. This foundation is your organization's purpose combined with principles and values and it starts at the executive level.

John Toussaint, MD, co-author of Becoming the Change and thought leader in healthcare improvement describes using an A3 for personal development at the leadership level.

Designing new care models is the way that healthcare organizations are preparing for the demands in the future healthcare environment. To truly redesign a care model means to drastically change the way an organization delivers care to their patients. 

Colby Parrott, Director of Organizational Effectiveness at Vancouver Clinic, joins us to discuss how process improvement supports the strategy of the organization. Aligning the work of the organization with strategy is an integral step in achieving success.

Dr. Lee Erickson, a long-time lean leader with experience in multiple healthcare organizations, discusses with us how a daily management system can help reduce the need for a full-blown root cause analysis.

John Toussaint, MD, founder of Catalysis and co-author of Becoming the Change, explains why leader behaviors are fundamental to building a culture of improvement.

Pam Helander, Catalysis Faculty, to discusses lessons learned while implementing a lean management system. Pam has worked in many roles within healthcare, from a bedside nurse to the executive level and has spent a large part of her career developing, implementing, and leading within a lean management system.

Paul Kempinski, President and Chief Executive Officer at Children’s Mercy Kansas City; a member of the Catalysis Healthcare Value Network, shares how Children’s Mercy now has a network of over 300 tiered huddles that occur throughout their organization each day and activating their over 8000 employees as improvement specialists.

Many news headlines have been highlighting the fact that the US is not vaccinating as many people per day as they had hoped. There is a myriad of reasons, but it often comes down to lack of planning, poor processes, and flow of the vaccines into the hands of those who administer them. But there are many healthcare organizations out there who are well versed in lean thinking and problems-solving th...