Submit a Blog Post

You’ve got a great story to tell, we can’t wait to help you share it! But in any civilized society, there are rules to abide by. Here’s what you need to know prior to make your blog post effective, intriguing and appropriate for Stanford Medicine. 

Rules of the Road

Keep it short & sweet!
1000 words or less, less than a five minute read.

Help us stay out of trouble:
– Ensure Protected Health Information (PHI), Protected Personal Information (PPI), or any information that would violate the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is not included.
– Use percentages of progress/improvement but do not use dollar amounts or specific numbers of defects reduced.
– Obtain written consent of individuals in photos.
– If you include a link to an article, it must be open access.

Let pictures do some talking, too! 
– Include non-copyright protected images with your submission. 
– If you are including pictures of people, please ensure you have their permission prior to sending them to us.

Types of Blog Posts We're Accepting

Though we want to accept everything from everyone, we do want to make sure our content is the most useful to our readers and collaborators! Please do not let this discourage you from reaching out if you have a great idea, it’s simply some guidelines and structure. Here are some examples: 

Improvement Project Reflection
Have you been involved in an improvement project and want to share your learnings? We’ll help you!
This is also the suggested template for those who are graduating the RITE and CELT program. 

Please use this link to submit an Improvement Project Reflection Piece

Perspective Piece
Though similar to the reflective piece, maybe you have a thought or a perspective you’d like to share that isn’t necessarily reflective on a project or team dynamic. These posts are our most free-form! Let your creative juices run wild. 

Please email us at
smci@stanfordhealthcare.org
if you want to submit a Perspective Piece.

Not Sure Where to Start?

“Start With Why” 
This Ted Talk by Simon Sinek is a great video on how to “explain when things don’t go as we assume.” If you’re not sure how to go about writing your blog post, we recommend watching this to help you go about structuring your reflection.

Also, take a look at these example posts! We love their content and find them helpful for inspiring others to get the creative writing juices going. 

Failing to Make Discharges Happen By Noon​ By Hurley Smith

 

You read that right, we failed… if you define success with a SMART goal. While we may have fallen short of our quantitative target, we succeeded in generating valuable knowledge about our care delivery system. This post is this author’s attempt to preserve our lessons learned and normalize writing about projects that don’t go the way we want them to. Imagine how your project might be different if you could read a blog post from team’s that have tried to solve your problem before! If we all share, we all learn, and we all become better at solving problems. Here’s to making blogging about improvement work popular.

Read the full article here.

Not sure what you’re looking for? Check out these blog posts sorted by categories like Operational Plan Domain.

Alice R. Georgitso, MPH, joins the SMCI Advisory Committee as our first Patient Partner. Alice has served as a Patient Partner with the Stanford Health Care (SHC) Patient & Family Partner Program for over 4 years and was appointed Chairperson of the Adult Congenital Heart Program Patient & Family Advisory Council in January 2020. She assisted in developing the Stanford Adult Congenital Heart Program’s Peer-to-Peer Program and serves as a Mentor to ACHD patients pre-and-post-organ transplantation. Alice has presented Stanford Health Care’s C-I-CARE framework for structuring best practice communications and developing relationship-based care approaches with patients and colleagues to 500+ Stanford Medicine Directors, Managers and Clinical Staff.

Alice is a Patient Relations Manager at Stanford Health Care. Within her role, she provides a channel for problem resolution to promote the highest quality of care and service excellence. Alice has also worked as an Unrelated Donor Search Coordinator with the Blood & Marrow Transplant at Stanford Health Care to coordinate allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplants through collaborative planning and partnership with the National Marrow Donor Program and SHC clinicians. Prior to her work with SHC, she was the Community Service Foundation Director at San Mateo County Medical Association where she partnered with local stakeholders and clinicians to expand county-wide community health programs to diverse populations. She has also delivered invaluable community health services through her work with the American Heart Association.

Alice earned her Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Biology at Saint Bonaventure University in Olean, NY and her Master of Public Health from SUNY Buffalo in Buffalo, NY. Alice is a member of The Beryl Institute and Adult Congenital Heart Association professional associations, Donor Network West partner advocating for organ, eye, tissue, and blood donation, and remains an active volunteer with SHC. Alice continues to promote patient-and-family-centered care in both hospital and community settings to support precision health and improve the healthcare experience for patients, families, and clinicians.

John Shook learned about lean management while working for Toyota for 11 years in Japan and the U.S., helping it transfer production, engineering, and management systems from Japan to NUMMI and other operations around the world. While at Toyota's headquarters, he became the company's first American kacho (manager) in Japan. In the U.S., Shook joined Toyota’s North American engineering, research and development center in Ann Arbor, Michigan as general manager of administration and planning. His last position with Toyota was as senior American manager with the Toyota Supplier Support Center in Lexington, Kentucky, assisting North American companies adopt the Toyota Production System. Shook co-authored Learning to See, the book that introduced the world to value-stream mapping. He also co-authored Kaizen Express, a bi-lingual manual of the essential concepts and tools of the Toyota Production System. With Managing to Learn, Shook revealed the deeper workings of the A3 management process that is at the heart of Toyota’s management and leadership.
Shook is an industrial anthropologist with a master’s degree from the University of Hawaii, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Tennessee, and is a graduate of the Japan-America Institute of Management Science. At the University of Michigan, he was director of the Japan Technological Management Program and faculty member of the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering.
Shook is the author of numerous articles, including "How to Change a Culture: Lessons from NUMMI"; Sloan Management Review, January 2010, which won Sloan’s Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize for outstanding article in the field of organizational development.

The Stanford Medicine Center for Improvement benefits from the diversity of its members and the richness of the experiences that they bring. Although the program continues to evolve from when it first launched in October 2019, we continue to reach out to improvers across Stanford Medicine in the School of Medicine, Stanford Health Care, Stanford Children’s Health, Stanford ValleyCare, UHA and PCHA. We welcome everyone from every discipline and recognize that we are stronger together as we value the contributions of every member of our teams.

Dr. Paul Maggio is the Chief Quality Officer of Stanford Health Care. Prior to being appointed the SHC CQO, he was Vice Chair of Surgery for Clinical Affairs, Associate Chief Medical Officer of Operational Effectiveness, and Associate Director of the Adult Intensive Care Unit. He trained in General Surgery at Brown University and obtained advanced training in Adult Surgical Critical Care and Trauma at the University of Michigan. He holds a Masters of Business Administration from the University of Michigan and is triple board certified in General Surgery, Critical Care, and Medical Informatics. In addition to being a clinician and surgeon, Dr. Maggio participates in the National Committee on Healthcare Engineering for the American College of Surgeons, and his research interests are focused on the delivery of high-value care.

Dr. Maggio received the SHC Board of Hospital Director’s Denise O’Leary Award for Clinical Excellence in 2013

Micah Duchesne joined Stanford Medicine in 2020 as a Principal Consultant project managing the deployment and operations of the Hospital Incident Command System (HICS) for COVID-19. He is now the Administrative Director of Performance Improvement at Stanford Health Care where he leads annual operations planning, improvement consulting, and capability development. Micah is also a Fellow at the Stanford Medicine Center for Improvement.

Before joining Stanford, Micah was an independent consultant for his company Silicon Valley Strategy Group, which partnered with Novartis and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania to commercialize cellular therapies. He led a team of clinicians from Europe, Japan, and Australia in designing a global logistics model and quality management system for Kymriah, the world's first approved CAR-T therapy, and helped create an international advisory board aimed at improving global capacity.

Prior to independent consulting, Micah was the Director of Performance Improvement at Kaiser's Santa Clara Medical Center, and he previously held improvement roles of increasing complexity within other health systems. Micah has both a Bachelor of Science in Accounting and Master of Health Services Administration from Mississippi College. He also holds certifications as a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and Project Management Professional.

As a professional, Micah enjoys organizing complex stakeholder ecosystems, clarifying ambiguous goals, aligning visions, and driving high-stakes change. As a human, Micah just enjoys breaking a sweat. While he's not at work, he's at his very own gym in San Jose, CrossFit Moxie. You can find him there coaching olympic weightlifting or working out with his wife. He has a daughter in elementary school and two gym dogs.