Laura Adams

Resiliency; Burnout; Connection to Purpose

The social fabric of healthcare is torn and it’s impeding our ability to realize the promise of the Quadruple Aim of better health, better patient experiences, lower cost, and joy in work. Many in healthcare are feeling disconnected and isolated amid the cataclysmic changes that healthcare is undergoing. These dizzying forces—such as market disruption by non-healthcare giants, the rapid movement into the digital world, and the relentless focus on measurement—has us questioning all we thought we knew as healthcare professionals and could rely on. This session restores a deep connection to purpose and imparts practical, everyday tools to help providers find meaning in their work, connect more deeply with patients, build personal resiliency, and ultimately achieve better clinical outcomes. Through creating connection at a human, heart level, we can rebuild authentic connections to our patients and each other, and maybe most importantly, to ourselves, so that we’re fully capable of caring for others. Creating this tapestry borne out of human connection heals more deeply and completely than we think possible.

Participants will be able to:
1. Identify major forces putting providers at risk for demoralization, stress, and loss of the sense of purpose
2. Describe the effect of human connection—and lack thereof—in clinicians’ personal and professional lives
3. Employ innovative, practical, and effective approaches that contribute to restoring a sense of connection, purpose, and vitality to those providing care

Digital Health

The recent and exponential advances in Digital Health are coming at us at an astonishing rate, forever changing healthcare as we know it. The future will bring unprecedented innovation and lay the groundwork for more effective person-centered care and more rapid research discoveries than we ever dreamed possible. However, as with all cataclysmic change, Digital Health has brought hope, but also hype, and in some cases, harm. To harness the best of Digital Health and minimize the risks, healthcare organizations and clinicians must understand the Digital Health landscape and how to navigate it. No discussion of Digital Health would be complete without addressing issues of patient privacy and agency over their healthcare data. Optimizing the power of Digital Health requires balancing the rights of individuals and the tremendous opportunity for the public good that comes from data aggregation.

This session will explore the inspiring impact of such things as “the digitized patient”, interoperability, big data, and analytics, as well as artificial intelligence/machine learning. It will also call out some causes for concern that warrant a pause along the path to avoid hardwiring harm into the future.

Participants will be able to:
1. Describe major digital health trends and the potential for positive impact on patients/families, clinicians, healthcare organizations and communities
2. Identify digital health’s unintended consequences and situations where the hype is outpacing reality
3. Leave the session equipped with a greater capacity to maximize the power and minimize the peril of digital health for personal, organizational, and community-wide benefit

Relationship-centered Care

Healthcare professionals are challenged to chart a path forward that focuses on optimization of health rather than just treatment of disease. To assure an organization’s ongoing clinical and financial success, rethinking our relationship with patients is imperative. Our oft-stated goal of “engaging the patient” exposes a core belief that we still see ourselves at the center of the healthcare system—that patients should engage with us. This carries great risk in the era of value-based payment models and prevents us from providing the clinically effective and holistic human care to which we all aspire. The key is to engage more deeply in the lives of our patients. This involves more than just what goes on within the walls of the hospital or physician office. The best results are coming from activated communities where information flows from many sources and healthcare meets patients where they are. “Come and get it care” is a thing of the past and patient-driven design and delivery are becoming the essential business strategy in healthcare organizations of all sizes and types. When the patient experience guides design, we can create a health care system worthy of those who depend on it literally for their lives.

Participants will be able to:
1. Discuss the importance of engaging in the lives of patients and how this differs from the traditional
approach of engaging patients in the delivery system.

2. Discuss the implications of adopting a commitment to community-wide collaboration and assuring that data follows the patient.

3. Describe the relationship between patient stories and “connecting the dots” for emergence of better,
more creative designs of care delivery.

Quality Improvement

Healthcare organizations that are achieving success in the era of value-based payments, digital health, and relationship-based care are agile, adaptive, and capable of organization-wide continuous improvement. These “Learning Health Systems” lever the knowledge gained from every patient to make care better for all those that follow. This presentation covers the basic principles of continuous quality improvement (CQI); understanding work as process; the concept of and methods behind Plan Do Study Act (PDSA) and other models to accomplish rapid cycle improvements; identifying and acting on special and common cause variation; the role of reliability science and human factors in driving healthcare improvement; approaches to putting patients on improvement teams; the role of CQI ineffective development of care standardization, best practices, and practice guidelines; and the power of CQI to help reweave human connection and restore meaning in healthcare.

Participants will be able to:
1. Articulate the power of quality improvement as not only a core business strategy but as an approach to deepening the sense of meaning in healthcare
2. Describe the practical use of the rapid-cycle (Plan-Do-Study-Act) scientific method for continuous quality improvement, including minimizing the burden of data collection
3. Apply the theory and tools in their daily work to drive patient safety, clinical quality improvement, and operational efficiency, and to reconnect to purpose