Archive

Healthcare organizations are pressed at every point of care to create an ‘always experience’ every time, for every patient. We face the necessity of continuous improvement in healthcare delivery. Patients are increasingly expecting higher levels of care and service. This type of care takes detailed integration across the entire system which forces organizations to seek […]

Too often, I have encountered leadership teams who were shocked or surprised to find out information that they wish they had known ahead of time. These instances share commonalities: Finding out after a negative safety event or near miss that a team member knew there was a problem but was afraid to speak up  Learning […]

“This is not my first hurricane”, I thought, as Florence was about to wreak havoc on Wilmington, NC, and our new home. I have been in North Carolina for 15 years and faced a number of hurricanes and tropical storms as a former hospital CEO, but this time, it was different. From being a leader during […]

Who among us has not looked at our own leadership ranks and said, “I think I’d like to give that a try”? As nurses, we may aspire to both clinical and leadership excellence. As we become clinically competent, we may feel a new calling, a curiosity, or even a longing to lead. We (or others) […]

In my role as a physician and physician champion, I have the opportunity to exchange stories with other doctors and with members of the executive team. Besides the connections we make through the typical sharing of referrals and the more formal rounding process of navigating and implementing a new EMR, I think the informal conversations […]

“High reliability has come of age.” So says Chuck Stokes, President and CEO of Houston’s Memorial Hermann Health System in a recent keynote for UAB’s National Symposium for Healthcare Executives. The implications of his statement are wide-ranging and deeply important in our evolving story of U.S. health and healthcare. We have begun to understand, in […]

Every organization has a culture–as a patient or an employee, we know that culture by its look and feel, by the ways people talk to each other, by what is supported and not inside the organization. In today’s world of accelerating rates of change, we embark on many changes, sometimes haphazardly, assuming their implementation will […]

We have likely each lived the power of culture to support or derail our sincerest efforts to succeed. Recently, we have been reminded about the importance of culture when reviewing the results of the Beryl Institute’s 2017 Benchmarking Study: The State of the Patient Experience 2017: A Return to Purpose. In their report of findings […]