Lessons from a lifetime thinker and doer At just 7 years old, Story Musgrave faced a crisis that tested his critical thinking. While pretending to drive his father’s red farm tractor, he unlocked the brake, sending himself and the tractor down the hill into the river. He didn’t want to admit he was at fault,(...)
accountability
Armstrong Institute Hosts Inaugural Observership Program
Posted by | Preventing Patient HarmRecently, patient safety collaborators from across the globe traveled to The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to take part in the inaugural Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality Observership. Participants arrived ready to take a deep dive with the Armstrong Institute into Johns Hopkins Medicine’s prioritized approach to patient safety. This pioneering three-day observership(...)
36 hours. Unlimited possibilities to transform health care.
Posted by | Designing Safer Systems, Organizational and Cultural ChangeImagine this. You are locked in Turner Concourse for 36 hours with relative strangers, tasked with creating a project that will revolutionize health care. Now what? If you are one of this year’s MedHacks participants, you are out of the gate running, ready to innovate and transform health care. MedHacks, run by Johns Hopkins University(...)
Radiology’s Quality Improvement Committee: A Formula for Success
Posted by | Designing Safer Systems, Organizational and Cultural Change"That’s how it’s always been done" is a phrase you will not hear uttered in the Department of Radiology and Radiological Science at The Johns Hopkins Hospital or at Johns Hopkins Medical Imaging. Organizations often cite historical precedent for why “option A” is being implemented instead of trying “option B.” The radiology department has seen(...)
Hospital-acquired infections: How do we reach zero?
Posted by | Organizational and Cultural Change, Preventing Patient HarmThis week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued two reports that are simultaneously scary and encouraging. First, the scary news: A national survey conducted in 2011 found that one in every 25 U.S. hospital patients experienced a healthcare-associated infection. That’s 648,000 patients with a combined 722,000 infections. About 75,000 of those patients(...)
Company churns out burritos, French toast — and inspiration for health care
Posted by | Patient-Centered Care, Preventing Patient HarmThis year I am participating in an executive fellowship that is designed to expose leaders in various industries to the Baldrige Framework, a model for organizational excellence. As part of the program, the fellows visit companies that received the coveted Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Recently, we toured(...)
Health care needs greater accountability, not excuses
Posted by | Measurement of Safety and Quality, Organizational and Cultural ChangeI recently spoke to an executive in the energy industry who had a joint replacement at a hospital in New York. His wound developed an infection, which required four additional hospital admissions and several operations. He asked me about hand hygiene in hospitals. Proudly, I told him that, at Johns Hopkins Hospital, we are at 80(...)