Enhancing patient care will always be a Baptist system priority. Skip Steward, vice president and chief improvement officer for Baptist, continuously looks for ways to make information accessible for Baptist team members. He started a podcast, Connecting the Dots, in October 2020 to target physicians and encourage them to embrace process improvement discussions.
Since the podcast launched, Skip has created more than 23 weekly episodes, interviewing Baptist physicians and physician leaders across the country about what process improvement looks like for their hospitals. He’s interviewed leaders with UMass Memorial Health Care, Seattle Children’s Hospital and Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City, as well as Baptist hospital leaders and physicians. About 200 listeners a week from all over the world tune in to each podcast.
As part of the weekly discussion, Skip; Dr. Harvey Mason, chief medical officer at Baptist DeSoto; and Dr. Jake Lancaster, chief medical information officer at Baptist, share improvements to the Baptist Management System.
“If team members don’t feel encouraged, they can’t be coached,” explains Skip. “In the podcast, we examine the systems, what works and what doesn’t. We discuss how we can approach it scientifically at a very high level.”
Through the Baptist Management System and Connecting the Dots, Skip wants physicians and health care leaders to develop a scientific thinking pattern, making the “plan, do, study and adjust” cadence a natural way of decision making.
“Doctors already think this way with patient treatment plans, but they may not realize it,” said Skip. “We want to extend that to process improvement plans. What a patient experiences in the emergency department for example is not just the doctor interaction. It includes admissions, radiology and nursing. How can we improve those touch points for a better experience?”
The podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, Google, Overcast, Amazon Music and most other places where you listen to podcasts.
Physicians can earn CME credit for listening. For more information, visit the Connecting the Dots web page. If you have podcast topic ideas, please contact Skip Steward.
