Building a more equitable health care ecosystem is what keeps me engaged in our improvement world. Our primary organizational strategy at FHCQ is “applying an equity lens to build shared accountability for progress.” Equity as a concept feels omnipresent - I hate the idea of equity as jargon or worse – a commodity. I find...

I have been thinking often about communication as we move into spring – how two people or two organizations can seem to be speaking a different language event when using the same words. About how – in these uncertain spaces – coming to a shared understanding is more important than ever. I think about difficulties...

Patient Safety Awareness Week is an annual recognition event intended to encourage everyone to learn more about health care safety - this year scheduled for March 13-19th. The week serves as a dedicated time and platform for growing awareness about patient safety and recognizing work already being done. The Center for Patient Safety is promoting...

Hearts are a big deal. It is no wonder that the organ we’ve relied on to pump our blood since before we are born was once seen as the center of our emotional life. We change our diets to keep our hearts healthy, we take up running, we quit smoking, work to manage our alcohol...

Our vision, shared across the Bree Collaborative, Cardiac COAP, Obstetrical COAP, Spine COAP, Surgical COAP, and the Washington Patient Safety Coalition, is that every person in our community lives a long, and healthy life. Part of how we get there is a health care and public health system that is informed by appropriate evidence balanced with promising practice;...

A better health care system is possible. This vision, and the question of how we can all, within our varied and siloed systems, help to better meet the whole of a person within and outside of clinical care is at the root of our work at the Foundation for Health Care Quality. Last year at...

The article Burnout: Modern Affliction or Human Condition has stuck with me long after reading. The Mayo Clinic calls burnout “…a special type of work-related stress — a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity.” Similarly, the article There is a name for...

I love chasing that internal ah-ha moment that comes from challenging my internal knowledge status quo. Small and large learnings have such potential to lead to a more evidence-based approach to our jobs and our daily life. This is why I am so enamored with our diversity of podcast options – favorites include the Ezra...

I find the fallibility of our human brains very humbling. For me, this is a good reminder that we all need to anticipate our own irrational thinking and build space in our daily lives to make up for these errors. These mental errors influence our ability to make decisions and to make change happen -...

One of my perennial thoughts, aside from my perennials, is health care measurement. I appreciate reading how others approach this as in the recent Cancer Journal: What is health? – a piece by a contributor to the Incidental Economist who happens to also be undergoing treatment for cancer. He talks about three factors – longevity,...