WIHI - A Podcast from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement

Date: December 21, 2017

Featuring:

• Steve Spear, DBA, MS, MS, Principal, The High Velocity Edge, LLC; Author; IHI Senior Fellow

WIHI is pleased to present a Special Edition Podcast, Discovering Your Way to Greatness, featuring author and operations expert, Steve Spear.

Steve Spear, DBA, MS, MS, is principal of The High Velocity Edge, LLC, which provides advisory services and has developed software that enables accelerated problem solving, particularly with distributed workforces. His book, The High Velocity Edge, has won numerous awards. Dr. Spear is a Senior Lecturer in MIT’s Management and Engineering schools, a faculty affiliate at Harvard Medical School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. He is an internationally recognized expert on leadership, innovation, and operational excellence, and an authority on how select companies in various industries generate unmatchable performance by converting improvement and innovation from inspiration to repeatable, broad-based, skill-based disciplines.

WIHI recorded Steve Spear’s remarks on December 11, 2017, in Orlando, Florida, at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s 29th Annual National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care. Dr. Spear has a well-deserved reputation as an engaging speaker who equally draws on his own life experience and work with multiple industries to point out that better ways to do things are absolutely within reach. Solutions often reside in the new behaviors we’re willing to adopt. Steve Spear is passionate about improving health care so great care occurs as advertised, every time, all the time.  

The podcast is one hour; we highly recommend that you have the presentation slides (posted on this page) handy for reference as you’re listening. 

Date: December 7, 2017

Featuring: 

• ​​Victor Montori, MD, Professor of Medicine, Mayo Clinic

When Dr. Victor Montori first started talking about Minimally Disruptive Medicine ​more than a decade ago, he shook the establishment. Dr. Montori, who works with patients with diabetes, had come to believe that shared decision making – an effort to help patients make informed decisions about managing their health problems – wasn't proving all that effective. Dr. Montori felt doctors and nurses weren't factoring in the burden of being a patient with a chronic condition, and the real life challenges – social, economic, or personal – of following prescribed treatment plans. It was time, he argued, for providers to look up from strict protocols and guidelines long enough to get curious about their patients' lives in order to minimize barriers to better health, not add to them. 

Fast forward to 2017 and Dr. Montori is more convinced than ever that health care providers need to learn from patients and not the other way around. And to appreciate the circumstances in patients' lives that can compete with managing a chronic condition. This outlook is fundamental to the work of the KER Unit​ Dr. Montori founded at Mayo, the more patient-driven shared decision making​ he now promotes, and a new effort he's dubbed "a patient revolution for careful and kind care." The latter is the focus of a new website​ with recommended reading, tools, and activities.

Dr. Montori and his colleagues joined us to discuss this revolution on the December 7 WIHI: The (Careful and Kind) Patient Revolution.

Date: November 9, 2017

Featuring:

• Lindsay A Martin, Founder, I-Squared Consulting Group; Instructor, T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University

The health care quality improvement movement has rallied around some significant innovations over the years, many of which have had a lasting impact. The failure of most hospitals to make real progress on reducing hospital-acquired infections led IHI to launch the 100,000 Lives Campaign​ in 2004. The IHI Open School​ was launched in 2008 to fill in for what too many medical educators were failing to do: incorporate quality and safety into their health professions educational curricula.

Frustration with the slow pace of change is often grist for innovation. Ten years ago IHI chartered an R&D team to engage in a regular, rigorous process of examining and testing new ideas and models for their potential to further QI and improve health and health care. To acknowledge the anniversary, we took a look back at some of what's been catalyzed by IHI's Innovation team, IHI innovations that predate the team's work, and where we still need new approaches. This and more on the November 9 episode of WIHI: Health Care Innovation and R&D - Taking Stock at Ten Years.

Date: October 26, 2017

Featuring:

• Fred E. Shapiro, DO, Chair, ASA Committee on Patient Safety and Education; Founder, Institute for Safety in Office-Based Surgery

These days, no one thinks twice about getting a mole removed or undergoing cataract surgery outside of a hospital. Heading to an office practice or an ambulatory care center for what's considered "minor surgery" tends to be more convenient for the patient and often more cost effective. According to recent figures, upwards of 20 million outpatient procedures are performed in the US each year — everything from cosmetic to knee to eye surgeries. As the numbers rise, so do concerns about safety.

While serious harm, including deaths, remains uncommon in outpatient settings, adverse events can and do occur. When anesthesia is part of the surgical procedure, clinicians and staff need to know about the complications that might arise requiring immediate, lifesaving steps.

What are the complications? What are the specific steps? It's all laid out in a new checklist on this episode of WIHI: A New Emergency Checklist for Office-Based Surgery.

Date: October 12, 2017

Featuring:

• Jake Maguire, MA, Principal, Community Solutions, Built for Zero

On any given night of the year, the nation's homeless veterans number around 40,000; another estimated 84,000 fit the definition of chronically having no place to live.

Frustrated by the seemingly entrenched situation, a group called Community Solutions​has been using tools and methods and campaign-style momentum adopted from IHI and the health care quality improvement movement to decrease homelessness in the US. Their improvement science approach coupled with a strategy called Built for Zero​ is leading to impressive results.

Community Solutions has taken a rigorous, relentless, real-time, data-driven approach — including careful tracking of individuals by name, and the engagement of a wide range of social services and supports — and they're demonstrating that homelessness can be dramatically reduced. On this episode of WIHI, Jake Maguire, Beth Sandor, and Nate French from Community Solutions  describe communities how they have increased their monthly rates of housing homeless individuals by an average of 266% over four years.

Date: September 28, 2017

Featuring: 

• Derek Feeley, President and CEO, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)

​Burnout among health care professionals is quite real. At times the extent of reported stress and discontent​ seems so overwhelming, it's hard to know how to intervene in any meaningful way. Yet, many are trying.

IHI and improvement colleagues have been looking hard at the issues surrounding burnout in health care for the past three years. The result is an action-oriented framework and a new IHI White Paper, IHI Framework for Improving Joy in Work, to help leaders and managers more effectively engage with physicians, nurses, and staff in order to find out what gets in the way of joy in work — and to develop solutions together. We assembled a great panel to address these issues and more on this episode of WIHI, How to Beat Burnout and Create Joy in Work.