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Question: “How can we improve patient safety at this hospital?”

Answer: “Find out why your nurses don’t like each other.”

When I first read that comment, it stopped me in my tracks. I found it while pulling data and comments for a client who needed to understand what was going on in a particular area of patient care. It was in response to one of the open-ended survey questions, and it jumped out at me ...

Knowledge is power. Information is knowledge. Data is information. Thus, data is power.

But, unfortunately, data is not information. At least in its most raw form, data is only potential information; or perhaps more appropriately data contains information. So how does one best go about finding the information in data? There are three key steps:

• Asking questions about the data.
• Managing the data.
• Analyzing the data.

Let’s examine these in reverse order.

We all know ...

Health care leaders have many talents, and one of them is juggling. When I worked in hospitals, I was always trying to keep a lot of balls up in the air. I knew that when one fell, my juggling act would come undone and there would be balls hitting the ground all over the place. You can also call this chaos. I am sure many of you can think of the times when you had ...

A few months ago, I had a routine visit with my longtime OB/GYN. The exam room was newly outfitted with a computer suspended from the wall. The visit followed a familiar pattern with the usual friendly exchanges, with one exception: Periodically, my doctor tapped visit notes into the computer.

I asked how she liked the new electronic medical record (EMR). My doctor was enthusiastic about the possibilities, despite how different it all was from when ...