Leading Quality

Jaksot

• Putting Safety Into the Genome of Healthcare with Dr. Peter Lachman 02.07.2026 1t 20min

  Why This Episode Matters Patient safety has often been built around what happens after harm occurs: incident reports, investigations, accountability, and corrective action. In this episode, Dr. Peter Lachman argues for a more proactive and moral view of safety: one where teams talk about risk every day, anticipate who may be harmed next, and make safety part of the “genome” of healthcare education, leadership, governance, and frontline work. Key Ideas Explored The early safety event tha...
• Why Healthcare Leaders Only See the Tip of the Iceberg 18.06.2026 58min

  Why This Episode Matters Healthcare organizations often know they have problems with flow, safety, delays, frustration, and waste, but they may not actually see the work clearly enough to solve them. In this conversation, Maria Mentzer explains how See to Solve helps organizations surface hidden problems, involve the people closest to the work, and build practical problem-solving capability through simple, repeatable behaviors rather than heavy improvement infrastructure or abstract training....
• The Architecture of Belief: Amar Shah on Improvement at NHS Scale 04.06.2026 1t 1min

  Why This Episode Matters Healthcare organizations often treat improvement as a set of projects, tools, or training programs. Amar Shah’s work at East London NHS Foundation Trust (ELFT) and NHS England points to something larger: the long-term work of building belief, capability, infrastructure, and leadership routines so improvement becomes part of how a health system thinks and operates. This conversation explores what it takes to move from local improvement activity to organization-wide and...
• From Needle-in-a-Haystack to 95%: AI, Goals of Care, and Systemwide Change 21.05.2026 1t 1min

  Why This Episode Matters Goals-of-care conversations can profoundly shape serious illness care, but in many health systems they remain difficult to find, inconsistently documented, and hard to measure. In this episode, Matthew Gonzales and Deborah Unger describe how Providence treated serious illness communication as a systemwide quality problem, combining leadership commitment, clinician training, nursing engagement, informatics, and AI to make “what matters” conversations more visible and a...
• Building the Next Era of Healthcare Quality: Lessons from Belgium’s FlaQuM Model 07.05.2026 57min

  Why This Episode Matters For years, many Belgian hospitals invested heavily in accreditation. It brought structure, standards, and visible progress. But Kris Vanhaecht and other healthcare leaders began to notice a deeper problem: when accreditation became the goal, quality could become episodic. Energy rose before the survey, then faded after the label was achieved. The question became how to keep the useful discipline of accreditation while building something more durable. In this episode, ...
• Annie’s Story and the Hidden System Behind the Critical Error 23.04.2026 50min

  Why This Episode Matters Too many healthcare organizations still respond to safety events as if the main question is who made the mistake. This conversation offers a better lens: what in the system made the event possible, and how can leaders learn early enough to prevent the next one? Using Annie’s story, Dr. Terry Fairbanks explains why strong event review matters, why timely response matters, and why healthcare falls short when it treats quality improvement and safety management as though ...
• Can AI Improve Clinician Well-Being? 09.04.2026 51min

  Why This Episode Matters Healthcare organizations are investing heavily in new technologies, yet many implementations unintentionally add complexity to clinicians’ daily work. This episode explores a different question: what if we deliberately evaluate tools for their ability to reduce friction and support clinician well-being? Dr. Chris Dale and Dr. Ryan Dix discuss the development and evaluation of MedPearl, a clinical decision support tool built to streamline referrals and support frontlin...
• Why So Much Healthcare Quality Work Fails to Change the System (And What You Can Do About It) 26.03.2026 1t 9min

  Why This Episode Matters Many healthcare organizations say quality matters. Far fewer are built so improvement is part of daily operations. Too often, quality is treated as a department, a committee agenda, or a set of projects at the edge of the real work. In this conversation, Dr. David M. Williams offers a different frame. He argues that quality should function as an organizational strategy: clarifying purpose, understanding the system, choosing the right work, building capability, and cre...
• Leading with Love: Culture Change After a Healthcare Merger 12.03.2026 46min

  Why This Episode Matters Quality functions in healthcare often struggle with perception. Too frequently, they are viewed as auditors or enforcers rather than strategic partners in improvement. In complex environments like post-merger health systems, this perception can become an even greater barrier to progress. In this episode, Lisa Harton, DNP, MBA/MPH, RN shares a grounded, experience-based approach to reshaping the role of quality by focusing first on relationships, mindset, and psycholog...
• Closing the Gap Between Potential and Performance in Healthcare 26.02.2026 1t 5min

  Why This Episode Matters Healthcare organizations are rich with intelligence, talent, and commitment. Yet leaders across systems feel exhausted, constrained, and stuck solving the same problems year after year. In this conversation, Dr. Laura Desveaux challenges the idea that improvement is primarily about adding more initiatives. Instead, she reframes leadership as the disciplined practice of learning, from everyday evidence, from diverse voices, and from the tensions we often try to resolve...
• Building the Support System Family Doctors Have Been Missing 12.02.2026 48min

  Why This Episode Matters In health systems around the world, the promise of better data is often discussed—but rarely realized in a way that actually supports clinicians at the point of care. In this episode, Gayle Grout shares her journey from technology and consulting into leading the Health Data Coalition of British Columbia (HDC), a physician-led not-for-profit organization that aggregates electronic medical record (EMR) data across multiple systems to help primary care providers understa...
• What Does a Chief Quality Officer Actually Do? 29.01.2026 45min

  Episode Summary What does the Chief Quality Officer role actually entail once you get past regulatory compliance and dashboards? In this episode, Dr. Abraham Jacob draws on years as a system-level CQO to explain how quality leadership really works in practice: where to start, what to prioritize, and how culture, safety, and accountability interact over time. The conversation is grounded in lived experience, including successes, failures, and lessons learned during periods of workforce instabi...
• Building Improvement Into the DNA of Healthcare Systems 15.01.2026 1t

  Why This Episode Matters Quality improvement in healthcare is still too often treated as a series of isolated projects—well-intentioned, time-limited, and disconnected from daily operations. Despite decades of progress, this approach struggles to sustain change, reach every patient, or address equity at scale. This episode explores why that gap persists and what it takes to move from episodic improvement to system-level capability. It’s especially relevant for clinical leaders, quality execut...
• Think Like a Scientist: Why Great Healthcare Leaders Don’t Pretend to Have the Answer 01.01.2026 1t

  Why This Episode Matters Healthcare organizations invest enormous effort in quality improvement projects, yet many struggle to achieve durable change. Too often, improvement is treated as something that happens at the frontline, while leadership behaviors, management systems, and organizational culture remain untouched. In this episode, Dr. Lee Erickson reflects on decades of hands-on improvement work to explain why real progress depends less on tools and more on how leaders think, learn, and...
• Why Building Leaders May Be the Most Important Quality Improvement Work 18.12.2025 50min

  Why This Episode Matters Healthcare quality work often stalls not because of a lack of methods or data, but because organizations fail to build the leadership and culture needed to sustain improvement. In this episode, Dr. Todd Allen reflects on his journey from frontline emergency medicine to senior quality leadership at Intermountain Healthcare and The Queen’s Health Systems, and how his view of quality evolved from tools and measurement to leadership, trust, and psychological safety. The c...
• The Hidden Danger Outside the Hospital: How Families and Clinicians Reinvented Home Care for Pediatric Oncology Patients 04.12.2025 59min

  What if some of the biggest gains in patient safety aren’t inside hospitals at all—but at the kitchen table? In this episode, Dr. Amy Billett and Dr. Chris Wong walk us through the groundbreaking, cross-disciplinary effort at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s in collaboration with Ariadne Labs that cut ambulatory central-line–associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs) for pediatric oncology patients by ~50%. It’s a story of co-design, equity, humility, and design thinking—with families as full c...
• Values in a Crisis: Trust, Transparency, and the Culture That Endures 20.11.2025 48min

  What if the hardest part of quality isn’t finding the right answer, but making the right action unmistakable for the people who deliver care? That’s the thread we pull with Dr. Hilary Babcock—infectious disease physician, longtime infection prevention leader, and now chief quality officer helping steer a 12-hospital system of 33,000 people through transformation without losing its soul. We talk about learning to lead beyond subject-matter expertise and how COVID pressure-tested every leaders...
• Human Factors as Healthcare’s Secret Advantage: How an Open Door and a Tiny Tube Revealed System Flaws 06.11.2025 36min

  A door swinging open in the OR. A tiny defect in IV tubing. Both seem trivial—until you realize they expose how fragile our systems really are. In this episode, Allie Muniak, Executive Director of Health System Improvement at Health Quality BC, shows how human factors turns everyday frustration into lifesaving insight. We follow her path from psychology to system redesign, uncovering how design, teamwork, and curiosity prevent harm long before checklists or policies do. Allie explains what hu...
• Small Changes That Move Mountains: Metrics That Matter and the Outpatient Revolution 23.10.2025 43min

  A small change at the bedside can ripple across an entire system. That’s the spark behind this conversation with Dr. Khalil Sivjee, Medical Director at Cleveland Clinic Canada and pulmonary–critical care physician, as we explore how data, design, and relentless measurement turn delays into decisions and anxiety into action. We begin in the ICU, where a simple ventilator-liberation protocol challenged “that’s how we do it” and proved that even a junior clinician can drive measurable improvemen...
• How a High Reliability Transformation Cut Preventable Harm by 90% 09.10.2025 45min

  Safety isn’t a side project. It’s the operating system. We sit down with Paul Lambrecht, a rare blend of front line paramedic sensibility and executive discipline, to unpack how high reliability organizing moves from idea to front line work. From standing up daily safety huddles to building a just culture where ARCC and SBAR actually get used, Paul explains how to turn near misses into gold, flatten authority gradients, and create a system where performance as intended becomes the...