The Lens

Jurriaan de Jong, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Operations and Business Analytics at The Ohio State University explains the value and power of taking improvement students to the gemba at a variety of organizations.

Dr. John Toussaint discusses the impact of electronic health information on care delivery and the possibilities of AI to help providers improve care.

Yazmyne Campos, the Accreditation Manager at Torrance Memorial Medical Center in southern California describes her journey into improvement, quality and accreditation, a path she did not originally envision for herself.

Dorothy Hung, Ph.D., Director of the Center for Lean Engagement & Research (CLEAR) at the University of California – Berkley shares the results from research done on advancing health equity and leader practices. These findings will also be presented in a published paper.

Dr. John Toussaint, Catalysis' Executive Chairman of the Board and Steve Shortell, Co-Founder of the Center for Lean Engagement and Research (CLEAR) at the University of California – Berkley, follow-up with us on the discussion they started on episode 85 about their article “The Better Care Plan: A Blueprint for Improving America's Healthcare System” and the coalition workgroups that have started up.

John Toussaint, MD joins us as we celebrate our 100th episode of The Lens and helps us reflect on where we have been and where we hope to go in the future.

Kathryn Correia, President and CEO, Emerita for Legacy Health, joins us to share about how she and her team at Legacy navigated multiple crises in Portland, Oregon during the tumultuous year of 2020.

Emily Jackson, Chief Nursing Officer and Vice President of Patient Care Services at New York Presbyterian Hudson Valley Hospital, tells the story of the journey to her current role.

John Boyko, a Director at the Kaizen Promotion Office (KPO) at Washington Hospital Health System in Fremont, California describes how their KPO Team practiced what they preached in reviewing, studying, and adjusting their internal Management System training program.

Sam Nordberg, who serves as the Chief of Integrated Behavioral Health at Reliant Medical Group in Massachusetts, tells us about the platform-based digital Ecosystem they are using to help treat mental health issues.

Carol Shields, the Director of Performance Excellence at Community Health Network in Indiana, explains how their Baldridge award journey has helped the improvement work at Community Health.

Bryan Cutliff, from SA Partners, details the concept and research of self-leadership and its role as an engagement system within organizations.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jamie Stillwill and Joell Teal, from the University of Washington – Valley Medical Center, share about their multi-tiered internal recognition program.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Information and EHR Messaging Platform Reduce Discharge Delays" on createvalue.org under Resources and White Papers.

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.

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.

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.

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.