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.

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.