The three person panel included: Tony Tomazic, Chief Transformation Officer for St. Luke’s Health System; Earl Sullivan, CEO of ES2 Consulting and Executive Chairman of The CORE; and Alistair Rock, Senior Consultant with Headwaters SC, LP.

Below is the video from the event:

Video streaming by Ustream

• Alistair T. Rock, Senior Consultant with Headwaters SC, LP.
• Earl Sullivan, CEO of ES2 Consulting and Executive Chairman of The CORE
• Tony Tomazic, Chief Transformation Officer for St. Luke’s Health System

Bios for each are provided below:

Alistair T. Rock

Alistair T. Rock is a Senior Consultant with Headwaters SC, LP. Mr. Rock brings a blend of executive, strategy and marketing, and operational level expertise, as well as corporate development and investment banking experience to client engagements. During his career Mr. Rock has advised on over $45 Billion of M&A deals and has an extensive executive network particularly in healthcare.

Prior to joining Headwaters, between 2009 and 2011, Mr. Rock served as the President and a Board Member of Unity Medical and concurrently as the Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer for its parent company, Unity Media Corporation. The Unity Medical position stemmed from his involvement as a Managing Director and Principal for Renaissance Partners LLC, a boutique investment banking and business advisory firm, and subsidiary of KWBH Law, which had recruited Mr. Rock from his position at Highmark.

From 2005 to 2009, Mr. Rock consulted with and then served in positions of progressive responsibility with Highmark, Inc., one of the largest US health insurers. During his tenure Mr. Rock served as V.P. of Operation for Highmark and concurrently as Chief Financial and Integration Officer of EBDS, a For-Profit subsidiary. Mr. Rock was then promoted to President and CEO of EBDS, taking the local company to national recognition within the top 15 consumer-focused healthcare technology solutions companies in North America.

Mr. Rock holds a Masters in Business Administration (Finance, Strategy and Accounting) from Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper Business School, where he was awarded the Marc and Sally Onetto Graduate Fellowship for academic achievement.

Earl Sullivan

Having consulted to a variety of industries including Pharmaceutical, Medical Device, Healthcare Information Technology, Social Media, and Food/Beverage, Mr. Sullivan focuses his time on building better companies, faster. Mr. Sullivan’s role is to give the companies the necessary tools to create balance and scalable structure while managing the hectic and often terrifying process of growing your own business. In addition, in 2011 he started to pursue his other passion and started a winery.

Prior to creating E2S Consulting, Mr. Sullivan served at a generic pharmaceutical company as CEO from 2009 to 2010 and as COO from 2007 to 2009. Mr. Sullivan’s background brings over 15 years of operations experience and has a track record for success in outsourcing partnerships, operational system development and developing early growth companies into mature platforms.

Prior to RxElite, Mr. Sullivan was employed at Green Mountain Energy as its director of operations where he built and managed the Midwest region through a period of high growth. Mr. Sullivan was also employed at Express-Med where he held increasingly senior roles including general manager, and helped to build the company from a start-up to over $100M in sales.

Mr. Sullivan started his career in operations working in West Africa and the Middle East on various assignments. Mr. Sullivan serves on a number of boards for both profit and non-profits and is engaged in a number of professional organizations including the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists, Vistage, and Parental Drug Association.

Tony Tomazic

Tony Tomazic is a corporate innovation leader. With eleven years of Interactive and Digital business development, he launched differentiating CRM, image and advertising campaigns for national and international brands. His explorative and aggressive approach to innovating consumer solutions drove success for clients including Maker’s Mark, Valvoline, Shoney’s, and multiple state offices. He won industry awards and recognition for creatively incorporating bleeding-edge technologies, while at the same time optimizing operations and expanding customer reach.

This proving ground of emerging technology was formative. Capitalizing on successful work with Community Health Systems (CHS), Tony turned his attention to the health industry full-time. He led consumer experience and innovations work for Humana’s Innovation Center for six years. Signature programs including the SmartSummary statement, My Body My Planet, Freewheelin – later B-cycle, and multiple Telehealth initiatives were managed or led by Tony during his tenure. Their compelling and behavior-changing character appealed to consumers in a sincere and personal way, and his work influenced the operating model of the company, its strategy, and its culture.

In 2011, Mr. Tomazic accepted a position with St. Luke’s Health System, as their Chief Transformation Officer. His responsibilities include establishing St. Luke’s as a transformational and national leader in Health and Health Care. At the system level, he now champions patient and caregiver-centered innovations to improve health, optimize care, and reduce the cost burden for all stakeholders.

The event features Daymond John, founder of the FUBU clothing line and one of the “sharks” on the ABC show “Shark Tank,” as our keynote speaker.

Below is the Official Event Program.  You can download it at SlideShare or here (1.8 MB, .pdf).

To purchase tickets, visit here.

The objective of the symposium is to bring together professionals and other stakeholders in both the scientific and practice realms of the health-care community and to bridge knowledge gaps among them. HF/E professionals will present the latest research, best practices, and case histories.

Several of the presentations from the three day event can be downloaded here.

IdaVation 2012 will be held on May 10th at the Boise Centre. As chair of the IdaVation 2012 committee, I’m pleased to announce that Daymond John will be the morning keynote speaker.  Below is his biography:

An entrepreneur in every sense of the word, Daymond John has come a long way from taking out a $100,000 mortgage on his mother’s house and moving his operation into the basement. John is CEO and Founder of FUBU, a much-celebrated global lifestyle brand, and a pioneer in the fashion industry with over $6 billion in product sales. He is an award-winning entrepreneur, and he has received over 35 awards including the Brandweek Marketer of the Year, Advertising Age Marketing 1000 Award for Outstanding Ad Campaign, and Ernst & Young’s New York Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

His marketing strategies and ability to build successful brands has made him a highly influential consultant and motivational speaker today. His marketing firm Shark Branding offers advice on how to effectively communicate to consumers through innovative means and connects brands with the world’s top celebrities for everything from endorsements to product extensions. John is also an author of two best-selling books Display of Power and The Brand Within. In 2009, he joined the cast of ABC entrepreneurial business show the Shark Tank by acclaimed producer Mark Burnett. Millions of weekly viewers tune into the show as John demonstrates his marketing prowess and entrepreneurial insights.

This should be great event with a dynamic & interesting keynote speaker setting the tone for a day filled with connecting, learning , and growing.

For those interested in attending, you can purchase tickets here.

To learn more, visit here, here, and here.

1. They assume “the more the better” and therefore put too many people on the team.
2. They assume that people who are similar to one another will get along better, and therefore compose a team that is too homogenous.
3. They assume that everyone knows how to work in a group, and therefore pay too little attention to the interpersonal skills of prospective members.

References

Hackman, J.R. (2002). Leading teams: Setting the stage for great performances. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Next Tuesday, develop.idaho 2012 will be held at the Boise Centre from 1:00 pm – 5:30 pm, followed by Tech Cocktail Boise at Liquid in Bodo from 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm.

The event, which is hosted by the Idaho Technology Council and presented by Perkins Coie, is put on to “promote and support the software community in Idaho.”

To learn more about the event and to purchase tickets visit here.

On May 10th, IdaVation 2012 will be held at the Boise Centre.  This year’s theme is “Think Different, Act Now! Actionable Ideas for Growth.”

It’s an important article for a couple reasons. First, it provides one of the best justifications I’ve seen for why Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE) should be considered an innovation. As the article notes, this is important to assist with “…the uptake and use of HFE tools, methods, concepts and theories in order to speed up and improve patient safety efforts” (p. 657).

Second, it provides a list of recommendations for HFE professionals, researchers, and educators that should be heeded “…in order to improve the spread of HFE innovations for patient safety” (p. 663). The only thing I would add is that most of the recommendations shouldn’t be constrained just too patient safety. Instead, they are mostly applicable to all aspects of health care, let alone other industries where HFE efforts have been implemented.  The recommendations include:

HFE Professionals

• Be aware of barriers to systems thinking; develop approaches for dealing with those barriers
• Know the complexity of HFE tools and methods; appropriately simplify HFE tools and methods
• Use an incremental approach to implementation of HFE innovations: from simple to complex; from low to high knowledge
• Use HFE knowledge to improve work and working conditions of healthcare professions
• Work on patient safety projects with healthcare organizations that have strong leadership, strategic vision and climate conducive to experimentation and risk
• Be aware of professional boundaries and social networks within healthcare organizations
• Conduct significant preparation work before applying HFE tool and method, including assessing potential impact of HFE innovation and evaluating support and resources
• Be aware of innovation adoption stages (i.e. awareness, information and training, and feedback); adapt HFE innovation to the adoption stage
• Be flexible
• Evaluate patient safety impact of HFE innovations
• Get involved in healthcare policy development
• Communicate with healthcare leaders and top managers about HFE and its (potential) benefits for patient safety; establish formal programs for disseminating HFE in healthcare and patient safety; work with ‘boundary spanners’ [For national and international HFE associations]
• Share best practices and lessons learned about patient safety improvement projects

HFE Researchers

• Develop evidence of the impact of HFE innovations on patient safety: criteria, research designs, generalizability, role of context
• Develop and test simple, reliable and valid HFE tools and methods
• Conduct research on significant patient safety issues
• Develop models and theories about mechanisms between work system characteristics and other HFE variables and patient safety
• Disseminate research results to different types of healthcare organizations (e.g., small and large hospital)
• Work on multidisciplinary research projects
• Conduct action research with cycles of learning and feedback
• Develop HFE tools and methods adapted to different healthcare settings and to the complexity and cultural and structural characteristics of healthcare organizations
• Get involved in healthcare policy development

HFE Educators

• Teach about healthcare culture (e.g., scientific inquiry)
• Teach diverse knowledge of HFE
• Teach about working in multidisciplinary teams
• Teach about innovation process and stages of adoption
• Develop HFE students’ ability to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity in innovation process
• Teach communication skills, in particular communication with top management and leadership
• Encourage HFE students to work on practical projects in healthcare
• Train healthcare professionals in HFE
• Teach HFE students how to be change agents

References

Carayon, P. (2010). Human factors in patient safety as an innovation. Applied Ergonomics, 41, 657-665.

Hal W. Hendricks is considered the father of macroergonomics based on work he performed in the 1980s and 1990s, but its roots extend to research in sociotechnical systems theory from the 1940s and 1950s (Hendrick & Kleiner, 2002, p. 14).

Macroergonomic principles have been applied to a variety of industries, including:

• Aviation
• Construction
• Food
• Health Care
• High-Technology
• Manufacturing
• Petroleum
• Trucking

Interested readers are encouraged to review the following references to learn more about macroergonomics:

Hendrick, H.W., & Kleiner, B.M. (2002).  Macroergonomics: Theory, methods, and applications. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Haro, E., & Kleiner, B.M. (2006).  Macroergonomics as an organizational process for systems safety.  Applied Ergonomics, 39, 450-458.

Holden, R.J., Or, C.K.L., Alper, S.J., Rivera, A.J., & Karsh, B-T. (2008).  A change management framework for macroergonomic field research.  Applied Ergonomics, 39, 459-474.

Kleiner, B.M. (2004).  Macroergonomics as a large work-system transformation technology.  Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing, 14, 99-115.

Kleiner, B.M. (2008).  Macroergonomics: Work system analysis and design.  Human Factors, 50, 461-467.

Last November, the Institute for Medicine (IOM) issued a prepublication copy of a report entitled Health IT and Patient Safety: Building Safer Systems for Better Care. According to the press release, the purpose of the report is:

To protect Americans from potential medical errors associated with the use of information technology in patient care, a new report by the Institute of Medicine calls for greater oversight by the public and private sectors.  The report examines a broad range of health information technologies, including electronic health records, secure patient portals, and health information exchanges, but not software for medical devices.

The report is the outcome of efforts performed by the Committee on Patient Safety and Health Information Technology “…to review the evidence about the impact of health IT on patient safety and to recommend actions to be taken by both the private and public sectors.” (p. ix).  The report provides 10 recommendations, two of which specifically highlight human factors, although several others fall within the realm of the human factors and ergonomics discipline.  They are:

Recommendation 5: All health IT vendors should be required to publicly register and list their products with ONC, initially beginning with EHRs certified for the meaningful use program.

Recommendation 10: HHS, in collaboration with other research groups, should support cross-disciplinary research toward the use of health IT as part of a learning health care system. Products of this research should be used to inform the design, testing, and use of health IT. Specific areas of research include: (a) User-centered design and human factors applied to health IT; (b) Safe implementation and use of health IT by all users; (c) Sociotechnical systems associated with health IT; and (d) Impact of policy decisions on health IT use in clinical practice.

The report can be downloaded here.  Also, the briefing slides can be downloaded here (.pdf).

National Health Expenditure Accounts are estimates of the “… total annual dollar amount of health care consumption in the United States, as well as the dollar amount invested in medical sector structures and equipment and non-commercial research to procure health services in the future.”  Additional definitions, along with the methodology behind calculating these estimates can be found here (.pdf).

Some of the highlights include:

• Total health expenditure: $2,593.6 trillion
• Health consumption: $2,444.6 trillion
• Investment: $149 billion
• Per person expenditure: $8,402
• Percent of GDP: 17.9%
• Annual growth from 2009: 3.9%
• Private health insurance (as a % of NHE spending): 33%; 2.4% growth from 2009
• Medicare (as a % of NHE spending): 20%; 5.0% growth from 2009
• Medicaid (as a % of NHE spending): 15%; 7.2% growth from 2009

References

Martin, A.B., Lassman, D., Washington, B., Catlin, A., & the National Health Expenditure Accounts Team (2012). Growth in US health spending remained slow in 2010; health share of gross domestic product was unchanged from 2009. Health Affairs, 31, 1, 208-219.