[MUSIC] Hello. My name is Nancy Tinsley, and I'm a healthcare executive with a career focus on strategy and improvement. Officially, I'm the Vice President of Clinical Institute Operations at University Hospitals of Cleveland. My involvement in the Interdisciplinary Healthcare Improvement course actually started out in 1994 when I was a student in the MBA Healthcare Program at Cleveland State University. The course was offered through a collaborative with Cleveland State and Case Western Reserve Universities. It was appealing to me because I'm very passionate about performance improvement in healthcare, especially as it relates to the effectiveness of our clinical work and the patient experience. Not only did I gain great improvement knowledge and experience from the course, I went on to support the future of the course. I became faculty for the course in 1999. My role was to coordinate the Interdisciplinary Improvement Projects with Cleveland area health systems and hospitals. These are the experiential projects that the students participate in during the course. Over the last 20 years, students have been applying the improvement concepts they learned in the classroom with actual hospital-based improvement teams. What a better way to teach interdisciplinary professionals the key success factors to performance improvement than by actually doing it in health systems? Students learn first hand to understand the challenges and barriers, and how to redefine work to create better outcomes for our healthcare community. The health systems that participate recieve the benefit of onsite student teams that bring new perspectives and experiences to their organization. The students partner with the health system improvement teams to learn improvement while delivering care. Building on my work in healthcare operations, I created and taught key content for the course. This included topics such as the evaluation of a team's readiness for change, how to effectively manage meetings so that decisions are made and goals are achieved, the key factors to success in project management, nd as important, how do we evaluate the effectiveness of their team work? The content of this class highlights the important role of frontline healthcare professionals like yourself as you play a critical role in redefining and improving the care you are delivering. Highlights of this course include completing the readiness for change assessment, learning how to run effective meetings and sharpening your interprofessional team skills. In addition, you will learn important areas of project focus, such as obtaining leadership support, having a customer focus, being data driven with your team, approaches that will be essential to your success. There are so many exciting aspects of this course. The most evident one is when student teams achieve clinical improvement. The projects that students have completed have contributed to our local health system's organizational change. One of our student projects identified the root causes of stroke readmission. This project benefited greatly from a student team statistician who taught multiple ways to analyze data and define root causes. It was a project that accurately disproved the hypothesis of the root cause, and greatly highlighted the importance of taking the time to understand processes and data before defining a solution. In another student project, the team reengineered the process in throughput of a very complex interdisciplinary clinic for brain tumor patients. The outcomes demonstrated a greater understanding of the throughput process and improved the patient experience. The course also includes a process to evaluate your team effectiveness, using a team evaluation instrument. The importance of teamwork as highlighted in the leadership literature demonstrates that the more effective the teamwork, the more successful the organizational change. Teamwork is a critical skill to master as 80% of all work in all industries is now done through teams. What I also enjoy in this course is the talent and enthusiasm that the students bring to the class. Your talent and enthusiasm as a frontline healthcare professional will ignite your improvement work. By combining your current professional skills with the improvement skills you learn in this course, you will contribute in a meaningful way to advancing the care of our communities in the healthcare industry. Enjoy your journey as you chart the future course of healthcare improvement. [MUSIC]
