Healthcare can feel chaotic, but what if it is actually complexity you can understand and lead through? In this episode of Success in Chaos, Angela Adams, RN, and Kandice Garcia, RN, welcome Dr. David Larson, professor of radiology at Stanford and director of the Stanford AI development lab, to unpack why “chaos” in healthcare is often the natural result of a complex adaptive system.
Dr. Larson shares practical leadership lessons for driving real change, including how his team narrowed 44 goals to 16 high-impact projects through a structured, collaborative approach. He explains why the best solutions come from the people closest to the work, and what it takes to create the visibility, coordination, and trust that improvement requires.
Episode chapter guide:
00:00 Introduction to Success in Chaos
04:08 Understanding Chaos in Healthcare
09:08 Navigating Complexity in Healthcare Systems
13:06 Empowering Teams for Success
14:36 Leadership in Complex Adaptive Systems
18:50 Selecting Goals for Impact
24:43 Learning from Failures
30:25 Celebrating Success Stories
35:09 Recommended Reads for Healthcare Leader
Dr. Larson’s Reading List
- Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World – General Stanley McChrystal
- The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization – Peter M. Senge
- Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration – Ed Catmull
Full Transcript
AI-generated transcript. Accuracy may vary; please excuse any transcription errors.
David Larson, MD
And so here’s the team, tears are running down their eyes because they were able to, in a systematic way, go through and fix this challenge. It
wasn’t a problem that anyone had created, right? It’s just that difficult to do in a complex environment. They solved it and they saw the impact. It saved lives and it clearly saved a really important life to a really important individual.
Angela Adams, RN
Welcome to Success in Chaos, a healthcare podcast. Each episode we are going to dedicate to unlocking success in the rapidly changing environment of healthcare. I am Angela Adams, the CEO of Inflo Health, and I have with me my co-host.
Kandice Garcia, RN
I’m Kandice Garcia-Thomkins, owner of Tungsten QI Partners and long-time quality improvement specialist. This week’s guest is Dr. David Larson.
Dr. Larson is a professor of radiology, specializing in pediatric radiology, and has served in many leadership roles at Stanford University, including the associate chair of performance improvement, the vice chair of clinical operations, executive vice chair, as well as acting chair of radiology, and currently is serving as the director of the AI development lab at Stanford. Dr. Larson is a national thought leader in healthcare quality improvement and is regularly publishing and presenting on his innovative ideas for successful transformation.
Now I have had the pleasure of working closely with and learning from Dr. Larson for the past 12 years as part of his quality team at Stanford and now as co-author of the Empower program and director of the ACR Learning Network. He is a true innovator and a dear friend of mine. Welcome and thank you for being here, Dr. Larson.
David
Thank you, Candice. Thank you, Angela. It’s a pleasure to be with you.
Angela
Thank you guys. And I had the pleasure of meeting both of you recently, at least in the last year and a half, and have enjoyed being part of the Empower program myself. So Dr. Larson, we have a fun little icebreaker that we like to do at the beginning and help the audience get to know you and help us get to know you even better. We’re gonna ask you for two truths and a lie. You can try to trick us.
David
Okay,
two truths and a lie. All right, Candice may have an advantage here, but let’s see how this goes. All right, I’ll give you, here are three points in no particular order. Number one, I have played Ultimate Frisbee in more than 20 cities around the world. Number two, I have sung on national television. And number three, I have a small vineyard at my home here in California and I have a small winery.
Angela
Okay.
Kandice
you do.
Angela
I know which ones I want to be true. Does that answer that?
Kandice
So.
Angela
Okay, I’m gonna guess that you have not sung on national TV
David
Okay.
Kandice
Yeah, I
don’t think I can participate. I think I know him a little too well for this.
Angela
You too? We do it? Okay, guess who’s make this. Which
one is it?
David
That is actually incorrect When I was in college I was in the concert choir And we performed on national television it ran for so many years that people would see the the special is on PBS and They would say I saw you on TV the same thing every time I saw you on TV TV and you look so young
Kandice
Hahaha!
hahahahah
Angela
That’s pretty
incredible. So which one was the liva, the vineyard or the frizz?
David
I actually don’t drink alcohol at all. So you don’t even want me choosing your wine, let alone making your wine.
Angela
There you go, there you go. Candice, think with your background in Napa, I think we would have helped have you choose our wine.
David
That
was good idea. That’s right.
Kandice
Yeah, he leaves that to me most of the time, for sure.
Angela
That’s right. That’s
right. Well, thank you for playing that. That’s always a fun game we like to start with. Candice, I think you’re going to open us up today.
Kandice
Yeah, you know, I just want to dive right in because, you know, for those of you don’t know us that well, Angela and I are nurses and Dr. Larson is a pediatric radiologist. And we have worked within the current health care system as part of the frontline staff. And through the ACR Learning Network, we have supported hundreds of health care professionals across the country to improve their work. But man, things are rough out there and it feels increasingly difficult to provide high quality care that our patients expect and deserve. So
I mean, what’s going on? Would you say that healthcare is in chaos?
David
That’s a question for me? Yeah, yeah. Well, I’d say there’s certainly a lot of chaos in healthcare and it feels chaotic. A lot of things feel chaotic, especially in the last few years. And by chaos, think what you’re driving at is it feels uncoordinated and it feels unpredictable. And that leads to a lot of stress. So I would say, yes, there is a lot of chaos in healthcare, but as you look closely at the chaos, it’s not…
Kandice
Yeah.
David
unpredictable necessarily, at least not as unpredictable as we might think.
Angela
So can we interchange then chaos and complexity in your terminology would you say? You’ve spent a lot of time here.
David
Yeah, you’ve heard me before. exactly. So what feels chaotic, meaning uncoordinated, unpredictable, actually can be seen as complexity. And there’s a difference between chaos and complexity. Complexity is the natural result of what arises in a complex system in which you have agents that interact with each other that can impact each other.
Kandice
Yeah.
David
And the epitome of a complex system is what’s known as a complex adaptive system, where the individual agents can choose for themselves, they think for themselves, can act for themselves, and the way they act influences the way others act. And so what emerges can feel very chaotic, can feel very unpredictable.
But the good news is there’s actually a fair amount of understanding of complex adaptive systems. And while they can seem completely incomprehensible and controllable, there actually are quite a few elements that are comprehensible and are controllable, at least in a certain way. But you have to see it differently and you have to approach it in differently. And control means a different thing in a complex adaptive system than it does in a…
David
more linear
system. So what feels like chaos isn’t necessarily just chaos and you can never understand it. You can. You have to see it differently.
Kandice
What are we experiencing then? So if I’m going into work and I don’t have the things that I need, maybe I’m spending a lot of time trying to organize my information, I’m making a lot of phone calls, it feels kind of like I’m fighting with people or I’m fighting to provide good care. Is that the complex adaptive system that I’m working in? How do I understand this in my day to day?
David
Well
Yeah, you’re certainly feeling the effects of a complex adaptive system. So what you’re describing is what happens really at the point of care, At where the work is done. In improvement circles, from Toyota Lean, we’ll call that GEMBA, right? It’s where the actual work is done. It’s what we consider to be the most important part of an organization because that’s where the value is provided to those whom you serve, be it the customer or a client or a patient. And so the effects that you’re feeling are of disorganization
organization, lack of coordination is what often arises when you have lot of independent agents that are not well coordinated, that don’t have visibility with one another. Often you have
people and teams optimizing one area and by optimizing their area, they sub-optimize elsewhere. They make it more difficult for others. And when you have a complex environment where they can’t necessarily see each other and feel the impacts of what they’re trying to do together or they’re not necessarily working collaboratively to accomplish a higher level goal, then a lot of that effort to quote solve the problems actually ends up causing other problems that feels
David
know, the chaotic like you say. So in a way it’s kind of like the Greek tragedy, right? By doing, trying to do the right thing, we actually bring about the very situation we’re trying to avoid, right?
Angela
Hmm, that’s interesting. So in your opinion, and I’m sure that you’ve had successes despite the chaos of healthcare or complexity or the adaptive complex environment that we’re in, but what would be something that you would highlight? We have a lot of healthcare leaders that listen to this podcast. What is something that you would highlight as?
some successes that you’ve seen and the styles and approach that you would use in this chaotic complex environment to drive that success.
David
Sure, great question. I think one that I’m particularly proud of that.
and was a learning experience certainly for myself and for our whole department. When I had first come to Stanford, I hadn’t been here very long, I’d been in the department of radiology, and we had a very ambitious goal setting program. And so the outcome of that goal setting exercise was 44 projects that were listed that we, as a department, wanted to accomplish. And having been at Stanford by then for about nine months, I was pretty confident that we could accomplish exactly zero of them.
because I’d seen, I’d been around long enough to see how, what the approach was to trying to accomplish these. So what we did is I asked that we step back a bit and get ourselves organized. And actually this is when we hired Kandice and others to put together a program.
Kandice
So.
David
pair it down and have a systematic way of deciding which of the things we were going to tackle. We weren’t going to accomplish 44 things, but we appreciated, I certainly appreciated the ambition to say, let’s see what we can accomplish. And then we organized the department and we put together volunteer teams to work on projects that were important to them and to the organization.
David
We let them design the goals. We gave them the support and the training as they went along and solved the problems themselves. And then they would come and report out to each other and to us how things were going. And when they were off track, we would
jump in and help them get back on track. But really it was about giving them ownership over these areas. And what we did was we accomplished 16 projects that were really
impactful. And what we heard from the participants was that the experience was transformative. And that became what turned into what called the RITE program. It started in radiology, was then adopted by the medical center. And then this is the learnings from that is what we took to the American College of Radiology in starting the EMPOWER program. And so through that program,
We’ve now sponsored over 300 projects. I think we’re over 3,000 people. This is at Stanford that we’ve sponsored. Now in the ACR, we’re up to several dozen projects and hundreds of people. And really what it’s all about is approaching it from the lens of, let’s get the people who are closest to the work to solve the problems, get them organized, and then give them the support and the trust that they can do it, rather than trying to impose that from the top down.
Angela
I love that. In startup, I have my top three list for the team, not my top 44 list. That would be quite daunting, but we have our top three list where if somebody comes to us with another problem to solve, it’s like, if it’s not in our top three, either we move a top three item, is it that important or does it take basically the 16th, 17th or 18th slot or wherever it is? But I love that.
Kandice
Yeah.
David
Well, but I’m to jump in on that because I could say if you’re in a relatively smaller company, as I understand it, and you’re focused, but if you’re in a larger organization, you’ve got a lot of things to do, you can do a lot of things. We did successfully accomplish 16 in that first year just when we were setting it up, but it does require organizing it well.
So I think that it depends on your environment. Sometimes I see that managers want to keep things tight and keep things simple so that they can keep things focused. But if you’re in a big sprawling organization, you end up leaving a lot of untapped talent and engagement on the floor rather than bringing in that creativity if you can organize it well.
Kandice
Yeah.
Angela
So is that what the Empower
program kind of helped or the right program and then now the Empower program helps teams to do is set that up for success, bringing the teams together as the first pillar.
David
Yes, exactly. So you bring them together, you work together in defining what it is they want to accomplish in a general sense, and then they go and put together a specific…
a goal, a smart goal as we call it, and you give them the autonomy to really work on it specifically, and then they come and report out. And so instead of us as an organization feeling like we have to constrain ourselves to what one leadership team can kind of manage, we say, well, there are so many things that need to be accomplished that can be done by many teams throughout the organization, and we will take what we call an eyes on, hands off approach, meaning we’re going to watch very carefully.
we’re going to do it in a way that’s supportive and helps them be successful rather than telling them what to do.
Kandice
So.
Angela
Let’s go back to that.
Yeah, I can’t.
Kandice
Yeah, I was going to actually touch on the leadership, know, a complex adaptive system like these, especially healthcare, right? There’s so much that we have to do. We’re integrating technology, we’re coming into the future, we’re trying to leave the past behind. We’ve got all these disjointed systems and payer mixes and all kinds of things that we’re contending with, not to mention that these are people, not products that we’re focusing on.
What type of leadership does it take to actually do this? Because what I’m hearing from you is that traditional leadership, keeping things small and contained and my action has a specific reaction, doesn’t exactly work in the healthcare setting.
David
Yeah, yeah. So I think if I were to summarize it, I think a lot of it is where people who have been successful in smaller environments or less complex environment, they’re the ones who are, and rightfully so, chosen as leaders to step up to lead in a more complex environment. And there is the intuitive thinking that more is just bigger, and bigger is bigger, and more is more.
And that’s actually not true, especially when when complexity is in the mix. More is actually quite different and bigger is different. So one example that I use, of my favorite books that has helped me taught this lesson is Team of Teams by Stanley McChrystal. And he talks about when he was a leader of the forces in Iraq, the American forces.
They were just getting out maneuvered by these small, agile operational units from the enemy who could move very quickly and who had much more communication and much more flexibility. The US had the military force in the history of the world, perhaps. And they couldn’t be nimble. couldn’t…
they were getting beat by these much smaller and less resource team. And so what their approach was, one of those I mentioned, an eyes on hands off approach. And the concept is empower the people at the lowest level possible. You want to match the authority with the…
match the authority with where the information is, right? And give them the ability to act, but keep an eye, but watch it very carefully. So when you’re in leadership, it’s not that you let people just go and do whatever they want, quite the opposite, but you watch it carefully and you see your job as a coordinator. You see your job as a person who gives guidance and nudges, right? Rather than telling people exactly what to do. Let them come up with thoughts about what they want to do in order to achieve the
David
larger
objective that we all have and then let them try a bunch of things, learn about it, and then figure it out themselves. And get them coordinated in talking to people across the organization to overcome the silos.
Kandice
So, you know, that actually feels like, you know, with lean training, they say respect for people, especially in a healthcare environment. These are people who are highly licensed, highly educated, doing very, very specific, unique tasks.
that are very complex, almost feels like that is like the natural style of leadership we should be providing for our healthcare providers, empowering them and enabling them to make the decisions. But it does sound like it requires a structure. It requires a framework for people to know how to participate like that.
David
Yeah, it requires a lot of coordination and just transparency and visibility and measurement and data and access to the data and sharing it and visualizing it in a way that people can act on it. And then being honest and candid about what it is we’re all trying to accomplish. And if you give people the tools and the structured environment, especially with the type of people we have in healthcare, it’s amazing what we can accomplish.
Kandice
and
David
you know, let’s face it, in healthcare we have the brightest people with the strongest mission and the greatest dedication to that mission. Like there’s no more noble enterprise. If we can’t make this work, if you’re a leader and you can’t make it work in this environment with the best people, with the best intentions, I don’t know where you can make it work. And if it’s not working, then it’s probably something that’s not being done right.
Angela
group.
Kandice
Mm.
Angela
Yeah, I agree. I want to go back to your 44 goals down to 16 accomplished. And my question is around if you’re speaking to health care leaders out there, is there a certain way that you should be selecting your goals to, I
guess, lead to more success? How did you narrow down from 44 to 16 and choose the goals that you did accomplish?
David
Yeah, great question.
So we did it in a systematic way and a collaborative way. So the first thing is we got together all the relevant leaders who were involved and a lot of them had, know, some of those projects were things that they wanted to do. And some of them were competing with things other people wanted to do. So first of all, get the right people in the room and frame the conversation. And we went through each project at a time and looked at their feasibility and the potential impact. So then we put it all up there and did that as quantitative
as we could and came up with a feasibility impact score, put it on a feasibility impact matrix, and then that helps frame the conversation. It doesn’t decide which ones you’re going to do, but at least it gives you more information. Then we looked at the types of projects that were going to be done.
how many of those could be accomplished in those specific areas. So we weren’t going to be able to do five projects in CT, for example, but we could do one project in CT, and we might be able to do one project in CT at the main hospital and one project in CT at the outlying hospital. We looked at also the people who would potentially lead those projects and their ability to accomplish them and also their…
leadership potential that we wanted to cultivate them. So all of these were factored in into this group exercise and put the puzzle pieces together.
David
and
set it up and then we staged it and we did the first eight projects in the first six months and then the next eight projects in the next eight months. So that’s what I mean by at some point organizing and coordinating and enabling people for success. We do that organizing behind the scenes so that by the time the team comes together, it’s set up for them to be successful, at least as much as possible, and then let them own it.
Let them figure out the specifics around how they’re going to solve the problem. That part, that’s where the autonomy comes in. But in terms of this overall structure and coordination, we take responsibility for that as leaders. And that’s where you can really unleash that creativity because it can happen in a structured environment where they can be successful and not be stepping on each other’s toes.
Angela
Hmm.
Kandice
Yeah, what I’m hearing you say is even the things that seem natural, like making decisions, require structure and framework in a complex environment. Like how do we make decisions? Who gets to make the decision? What are we considering when we make the decision? And what is the impact of that decision on all the other decisions that we need to make? That almost is like the things that feel like they should be natural should, could have framework and structure around them.
David
Yeah,
the how and who, right? The how is extremely important that we all have a shared understanding and hopefully a shared contribution for how we make the decision, the process for making the decisions. And the who is about the role, right? The who is not about the individual who gets to make that decision, except to the extent that they are wearing the hat of the role that they’re in and they’re acting on behalf of the organization. And when they step away, somebody else will make that decision. But that’s the kind of clarity and structure that’s needed for…
for a complex system that makes it feel predictable and fair.
Kandice
All right.
Angela
Hmm.
You guys both have kind of referenced the right people. You keep referencing the right people in the room. Tell me about that. How do you determine who the right people are for a project? Is there a method or a framework that you use there or is it more like you know your system and you know the people that are the right people? Is there any guidance you can give there?
David
Well, when you’re talking about for a project, the main…
David
The main thing is who is the process
owner, right? Who is responsible for making sure this works well going forward? And then who else contributes to that process? Who are the people who are part of that process and make it successful or have the potential to derail it? And then we make sure that they’re all included and they are organized in a way that is clear and makes sense. And sometimes when you do that, when you put them in a project, you actually change the org structure
some degree temporarily, right? You could have a project leader who is a frontline leader and you can have supervisors who are team members and that frontline leader is giving assignments on the project. But the most important part is we don’t try to solve other people’s problems. In other words, we don’t try to tackle a project with…
an incomplete slate of people, meaning that that team is going to come up with solutions that other people are going to do. If they come up with solutions that other people need to do, then those other people need to be part of the team and need to be making that decisions along with them. So that’s where we look at kind of the scope of the project or the scope of the process, how many, how many, ⁓
parts of the entities in the organization it touches, someone from each of those entities needs to be there. They need to be people who can get to yes, who can work constructively, and who can also represent their colleagues. And when they have to make the change, they can go back and sell it, so to speak. They can go back and get the input so that they’re bringing all those parts of the organization on board as they go along.
Angela
That’s interesting. love that get to yes. So I feel like if we reverse my question around success, like I feel like success is important to talk about, but I almost feel like the failures are just as important to talk about. I’m sure that you’ve witnessed just as many failures of process and system in this chaotic complex system. So talk to us about some lessons learned around failures and what you took out of those.
Kandice
you
David
There are so many ways to fail in improvement. In trying to change an organization, especially in a complex environment like healthcare, to try to get it to be what you want it to be, there are almost infinite numbers of ways that it can fail. And I think that brings an incredible humility.
David
if you’ve been through that enough times and seen projects stall or just fail. projects, unfortunately, often they don’t just like flat out fail all of a sudden. They just, you know, kind of start to bog down and they start to flag. Right . And so when that happens, all learning stops for one thing.
and then the frustration rises. So what can happen? So if you don’t frame it right in the first place, people don’t know exactly the problem that they’re trying to solve. You don’t have all the people who need to be contributing to that. You have either over specified or under specified your goal. The goal is either something that as you look into it was not even that big of a problem or it is something that is impossible for that team
to fix, or it turns out that goal wasn’t even as important in the grand scheme of things relative to what you were really trying to drive at. You can have a lack of alignment or lack of support with the organizational leaders.
you can, once you get the project going, there just at every point the project can stall or fail. can have not, you not have access to the data. You can not have the buy-in of the people. You can come up with really bad ideas and try them and implement them and then they don’t work. So I could go on, how long is this podcast? I could go for a long time. But the point is, so here’s the analogy that I, you know, that I…
Kandice
Yeah.
So
David
I I don’t know how I’ve run one marathon in my life. And at this point, that’s probably about as many as I’m going to run. it’s, yeah, there we go. But one thing that struck me is you run a marathon and they have way stations and at first they’re every two miles. And then after a while they’re every mile. And it’s amazing the things that they have at these way stations because they’ve seen it all before, right? They’ve seen how these things, how runners can, you
Angela
One word at me, so you’re doing great.
David
decompress and all the problems that can arise and they’re there and they’re waiting for you. So that’s what we try to do with our improvement programs. We’ve seen the times, the ways they go sideways and we’re right there for them. We try to anticipate, prevent and then once they’re in the middle of it.
We help them get back on track so that they can get all the way to the end and be successful in accomplishing their goal. Because once they do that, if they can go all the way through, then they’ve had that experience of going all the way through. And now they have both the confidence and the knowledge and can take others through that same journey afterwards. If they stop, if they stall, then not only is the project not successful, but now the learning didn’t happen and then people lose confidence.
Kandice
Yeah.
Angela
of that.
On those 16 projects that you guys accomplished in that year, would you say that it was one team doing these projects together so that they were taking learnings from one project to the next or were you switching up the people on each project and therefore having to teach a new group the framework to move forward? Does that make sense?
David
Yeah, yeah. we do this and we continue to do this. It’s actually, I’m humbled by how many things we got right the first time around, probably from the learnings that we had from before that we, know, that I certainly, I would say I had done wrong before. So we set it up as cohorts. So the first…
cohort had eight projects, the second one had eight projects. We found that that’s on ambitious side, but that’s what we started with was eight projects. And each team was made up, each project had a team of about between four to maybe eight people. We designated project leaders and we…
designated project sponsor. We assigned a coach to each of them. Kandice supported at least four projects at a time, which is a lot, but we had all the structure around them. And then we set up a training program, an educational program, whereby we would give them, teach them how to go through a project. And then they would come and report out on their progress.
at specific intervals. We had a very structured template that we would have them use. We would help them get the data and they have to share it in a certain way. And by doing that, they’re all learning at the same time. They’re learning general principles about improvement, but they’re applying it in their own area to their own project. So it’s not like we have to go and train one at a time. If we had to do that, then forget it. It wouldn’t have worked.
But by doing that, and then they start to talk about the challenges that they are having. And even though they’re tackling different problems, they experience similar types of challenges. And they learn from each other and they validate each other because the experience is tough, right? You go through this period where it just feels like you’re not gonna make it, right? And it can be discouraging. And so that validation and that encouragement is perhaps just as important as the learning from each other.
Kandice
You know, David, of all your years of doing improvement and projects and people that you’ve worked with, there somebody that stands out or some project that stands out to you as being just kind of extra special?
in your memory bank there. This is a really complex environment and there’s been some amazing changes.
David
Yeah.
Yeah,
it’s kind of like asking which is your favorite of your children, right? But it’s really wonderful to see them all. One of them actually, I’ll just give an example, is from the first cohort. And so the team leader was Daisha Marsh, who you know quite well. And this project was focused on decreasing the time.
Kandice
Yeah.
David
from when a patient arrives with symptoms of stroke, they get to the door, to the time they get their CT scan done so that they know whether they have a stroke and whether there are contraindications to going and getting thrombolysis or other treatment. so time is brain in that situation and you’ve got to move fast. And what initially drove the project was that Joint Commission had established that that should happen in 25 minutes. We were actually pretty much there already at 25 minutes, but
The team came together and they wanted to say, we’re not doing this because of joint commission. We’re doing this because we want to save lives, right? We want to do the best for our patients that we possibly can.
And so Dacia worked closely with Alex Cowlans, who was a fellow at the time. The two were the co-team leaders. And it was just awesome to watch. These don’t come in all the time, and you can’t predict when they’re coming in. So you can’t learn from them in the same way like you can learn from a…
an operation that just continues on your timeframe. So they did a lot of simulation, for example. They brought in patients and just timed it, like saw what would happen. They walked through their process. They realized that there was a lot of heterogeneity, roles weren’t clear. There’s just a lot of confusion. So they went through it systematically. They came up with the clarity around the roles. They even had signs as to who did what, and they just made it hum.
And so they achieve their goal and dramatically decrease their time.
One of the most incredible experiences was they were nominated for an award. It the Melinda Mitchell Award. was a quality award. Melinda Mitchell is one of the former CEOs at Stanford, and a quality award was named in her honor. And so they were surprised. So we told the team, including Dacia, come to this award ceremony. it was actually a larger meeting, so you didn’t know why she was there. It turns out that Melinda Mitchell herself came. That was the first time she came to one of these. And she said, well,
Kandice
Test.
David
This is more special to me and here’s why. And she said that her mom had been visiting from out of town and she had experienced stroke symptoms a few months ago after the team had put that in place. And the team was so fast that from the time that her mom arrived to the time that she was treated for stroke symptoms, I think it was 13 minutes. I mean, it was incredible. It saved her mom’s life.
Angela
Holy
David
She joked that when she was sharing this that everyone thought her mom was cognitively better after her stroke than before the stroke. She got on a flight and flew home two days after being discharged from the hospital.
Kandice
Okay.
David
And so here’s the team, tears are running down their eyes because they were able to, in a systematic way, go through and fix this challenge. It
wasn’t a problem that anyone had created, right? It’s just that difficult to do in a complex environment. They solved it and they saw the impact. It saved lives and it clearly saved a really important life to a really important individual. that was just a representation of the many lives that they impacted.
So that’s the beauty of this work. It’s often hard to see because it’s done in the background, but when it’s done, when you improve a process that improves lives, you not only improve that a few individuals that we as providers, we do on a daily basis, right? But if you can get that process to stick.
then you’re saving lives, improving lives for years on end. That’s the beauty of it. And that’s what we’re capable of if we can get ourselves together and organize ourselves well.
Kandice
My heart just always feels so full when I hear these stories, when I get to interact with healthcare workers in this way. Thank you so much for sharing that story and sharing your knowledge with us today. We only had a little bit of time and I know there is so much more in there. So we’re gonna have you come back and talk to us a little bit about.
David
was in trouble.
Kandice
the AI transformation of healthcare and how do we support our radiologists in this growing universe of lack of resources and not enough staff. there’s so much more we want to talk about with you. So thank you so much for joining us today. I’m going to toss it over to Angela.
Angela
Yeah,
Dr. Larson, thank you so much for coming on today. Again, like Candice said, I think we could talk for a few hours, but I think we only have attention spans for about 30 minutes. So we’ll cut it off here today. But one thing we like to leave the audience with is you are well read and you are a speaker across the nation and you teach classes. Tell us what’s on your reading list. What are some books that you would tell people to go read? You mentioned one already, Team of Teams, but
Any additional ones that you would add to the list?
David
Sure, I’ll give a couple. One that was really transformative for me was the fifth discipline by Peter Senge. talks about the fifth discipline, spoiler alert, fifth discipline is systems thinking. what that’s about. And another favorite of mine in addition to Team of Teams is Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull from Pixar. And he talks about how an organization can inspire and produce creativity.
Angela
You
Kandice
Yeah.
David
and the balance between the creative energies of individuals and the need for system management and discipline at the organizational level. But I could come up with a lot, I’ll leave you with those three. How about that?
Angela
That’s great, thank you so much. All right guys, have a great week.
David
Thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure.
Kandice
Thanks so much.
