Leading Quality

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...

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 rathe...

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 tak...

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, a...

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 accreditat...

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 w...

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 decisi...

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 s...

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 qualit...

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 d...

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) d...

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, failu...

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 capabi...

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 dep...

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 an...

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&r...

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 learni...

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...

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 ...