Saturday, April 14, 2012

My time in Champaign Urbana

I don't write too much about work on here, partially because I invest so much brainpower in it while I'm there (making thinking about it at home a hassle) and partially because in this day and age of digital connectedness there is a footprint I leave behind on this thing called the internet. Ideally, that footprint leaves something interesting for folks to read, and gives me an outlet for some of my thoughts, ideas, and ramblings on just about anything. But after spending a few days in Champaign, I felt the need to reflect a bit on what I saw and experienced.

For starters, the road trip began in Aurora, IL on Wednesday afternoon with the CEO and her right hand women (and yours truly) down the back roads of I47. For a guy who spends most of his life racing down The Eisenhower (290) and i88, it was nice to see something other than obnoxious billboards lining the drive. We got to Champaign at around 730, grabbed a bite to eat at a local college bar (Murphy's for those of you Illini fans), which I think made all of us feel slightly old, but young at heart. Our conversations ranged from my terrible App ideas (vocal "games" with siri so drivers can play something but not text...think sporcle.com on your phone with audio), the end of my professional swimming career (I hung it up after finishing 12th in the 50 Butterfly at Junior Olympics in Champaign, circa 1987...just like MJ, I went out on Top of my game!), and all sorts of other interesting topics about our lives both at work and elsewhere. We checked in and crashed around 9 to rest up before our visit to a healthcare system based in the Champaign community.

Oddly enough, this health system is almost identical in size, scope of services, number of physicians, and the community they serve. This visit is something that allows leaders of systems like mine to "go and see" how others are continuously improving the care they provide through the eyes of patients. My job is to help my current organization create a similar "culture", which means bringing people together to solve problems that patients, physicians, and even staff are dealing with. The approach we and this clinic (and many other great places) use is based on something called Lean, and there are lengthy texts, courses, blogs, and other such venues about Lean if what I describe sounds interesting. The methodology is what helps make sure your plane doesn't crash, your coffee experience at Starbucks is fantastic, and applications across just about every industry. Lean is based on several ideals and includes a number of fancy (sometimes scary looking) tools, but at its core it is about how we make things better by involving the people who do the work.

For those who know me personally, you know some of the challenges, drama, and upheaval I've been through as a patient over the last, oh 20 years of life. Thankfully, life is stable these days, but I've lived in enough hospitals, doctor's offices, pharmacies, etc., to understand a bit about when things aren't so nice for patients.

On another tangent, this week (April 18) will mark six years since the colectomy, and as my mother constantly reminds me, I wasn't so upbeat back then about my life. I was feeling like crap both mentally and physically and there were some grueling nights, some hard decisions that I wish I didn't have to make, and my outlook was shitty. I DIDN'T think life would get better at that time, and I'd be willing to guess many of you have (or will) face one of those moments when life doesn't seem fair. I have written plenty about all of that so no need to rehash it all...but after all of my drama, the one thing that mattered to me was that I was part of making it better for the next guy, the next family, the next kid, etc. On top of all that mushy gushy stuff, I saw my father end his career with a somewhat negative experience as a physician. And I'd like to see the people who make such important decisions on our behalf are respected for the work they do. Same goes for nurses who deal with patients like me, and the other folks who care for patients who are usually in a pretty tough spot when they come to see them. Before I go too far down this path, it probably helps to give you a definition of respect. Respect to me means instilling a feeling as if my skills, talents are supported in making the business better. Most people feel squashed by "the man" telling them what to do and how to do it, which couldn't be further from respectful in my mind and folks in healthcare are not much different.

So part of the purpose for this trip was for a few of our leaders to check out what was going on at this Clinic in downstate Illinois and how they're working to continuously improve in the eyes of their patients, docs, and staff. I had heard a few of their leaders speak last year at a conference out in Seattle, and from memory I knew they had the right blend of quirkiness, humor, and discipline around Lean...and on a personal level, it is always great to be around others with a similar perspective on making things better.

Without walking through every step of the visit, I'll describe what I saw as briefly as possible:

Our morning and afternoon involved 30 minute rotations to a number of departments to observe a process that happens every day, in every department across the clinic. This process involves a huddle (yes, similar to what you see on the football people), where folks are coming together at the start of their day to say, "How'd we do yesterday?" and "What do we need to do today to make it a great day for our patients?" In each department, those questions have slightly different variations, but these huddles are part of how everyone starts their day. And yes, there is some "homeroom announcement" kinds of things as part of the huddle, but they are looking both retrospectively and proactively at how they're doing. A big part of these huddles is discussion of team ideas, and each person at this clinic is expected to implement 2 ideas a year. Ideas can range from where to locate supplies to minimize searching, to improve how they do a certain task (i.e., labeling specimens), and even a few other ideas related to making the workplace more fun, healthy, or community focused.

Each huddle had its own "theme", which were pretty amusing--everything from sports to entertainment were used to help teams have some 'fun' with it, and they had free reign to do really whatever worked for them. We had a chance to ask questions to folks after their huddles, and it was so neat for me to hear from folks how inspiring it is for THEM to have a say in how things are run, how things can improve, and a sense of purpose to their work. This theme came out throughout the time we spent in Champaign, and what got me really jazzed was hearing a few doctors who were probably just as downtrodden as my father talk with excitement, passion, and enthusiasm about the work they do.

The cynic or doubter would probably read much of what I've written about and say "that can't possibly work" or "it must be a mess working at a place like that", but there is an incredible amount of discipline beneath the surface of the visual displays the teams use as part of their huddles. And of course, there are things that can be improved that they are aware of, but it was so nice to see a true "system" of people all working together to make it better and genuinely pumped about the place they work.

Our drive home was filled with some great discussion about how we can take what we learned and expand how we apply what we saw to our work, which is a task that is extremely inspiring with a high potential for great impact to patients, the docs that care for them, and the people I work with. As all of us went our separate ways, I took some time to reflect on where I'm at and how life continues to evolve for me, which is probably why I find myself on the blog this morning.

So much of what I've experienced over the past 5 years has centered around that concept of helping to make things better for me, the place I work, the planet I live in, and life in general, and I'm genuinely humbled and grateful for life's turns. I haven't always been comfortable or happy at each of those turns along the way, but each of them have allowed my outlook and focus to become clearer in terms of "what I want" out of life (including work). And our trip to Champaign was physical evidence of my enthusiasm to work in an environment others who share a similar passion for making things better in a systematic fashion. In simple terms, its great to have a team standing alongside me as we work to tackle the healthcare animal...




1 comment:

  1. Thanks for sharing so much about yourself, the healthcare system in various places and forms, and about people in general. Like you, my professional work is fueled and informed by my own experience and me desire to respectfully leave the world a better place (some mushy gushy stuff too) -- though my more disheartening past was in education, not healthcare. I'm constantly amazed by the level of disenfranchisement and disregard with which our patients (students) are treated. They often leave sicker than when they arrived; is this also because there is often a patient-blind process for administering the cure (standard approach to education/testing), and that this process undermines their sense of safety, autonomy, and potential?
    I deeply appreciate you showing what doesn't work as a background for pointing out some of the great things that do work, and which can be applied across business sectors. To say that you left your site visit seeking ways to employ their huddles (because of the humanity and trust they engender) is the greatest validation you can give. Praise is to say, this is awesome, great job. Yet it is ever more valuable to say that by doing that which you most admire. In some cases, this is akin to paying it forward. In other cases this is called, expanding your circle of influence. In more cases still, this is borrowing the idea/action and customizing it for yourself and your community.

    At GCE, we work tirelessly to cultivate an environment similar to the one you describe. Our staff members describe the jobs they do as the most challenging and rewarding of their lives. We informally exchange tens of ideas each day, hundreds per week, and we collectively deconstruct and reconstruct the system and model on a yearly basis. These reflective and team-oriented practices share the understanding and agency required for us to heal our patients and ourselves. In so doing, we constantly rededicate ourselves to our highest aspirations while simultaneously accepting that we are both flawed and a work in process. One thing that we will certainly borrow is to improve the way that we huddle -- I love the simplicity of "How'd we do yesterday?" and "What do we need to do today to make it a great day for our patients?" These questions can often lead to boring morning meetings when people check their email, but you've pointed out the essence of why this works and what we must bear in mind in order to succeed: the organization is structured, fact-based, but also invites just the right blend of "quirkiness, humor, and discipline."

    Thank you, Dan.
    eric

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