Two recent blog posts in The Health Care Blog highlighted for me how our efforts for health care transformation hinge upon two critical principles -- measurement and transparency.

This 30 Second MBA piece featuring Kaveh Naficy, Founding Partner, Philosophy IB nicely summarizes three keys to leading a diverse team:(1) find common ground -- help them understand why a team outperforms individuals; (2) get quick wins -- perhaps something innovative; and(3) transfer knowledge gained to other initiatives.

This article from the Chicago Tribune lays out nicely some of the diverse viewpoints on some of the latest quality data to be posted publicly by Medicare - complication rates. At the heart of the matter is that the data being reported is derived from claims (bills) submitted to Medicare, and therefore it was never intended by the hospital to be a reflection of quality.

Annie Murphy Paul reports on a very cool learning methodology in Time Ideas! Credited to Dr. B. Price Kerfoot at Harvard Medical School, its called "spaced repetition" and its worth noting for those of us who have to remember things for a living - which is essentially all of us!

Here is an excellent short video featuring Clayton Christensen from the Harvard Business School explaining his theory about "disruptive innovation," which in essence boils down to: existing companies' existing business models can help them innovate to build better products for existing customers, but shackle them from being able to go after truly disruptive innovations that can create different versions of those products for different customers - examples, cheaper high quality cars, or personal computers for the home.

We hear a lot about "mentoring" in the context of management, networking, and career development. The idea of mentoring is to establish a close relationship, usually one-to-one, between someone with wisdom or expertise in a particular area and another seeking insight and professional development in that area.

A recent article in the Boston Globe lays out the concern emerging from the hospital community over the "safety" data that was recently released publicly by CMS (www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/), and is also planned to be included in the "value based purchasing" calculations that will penalize hospitals who have low "quality scores.”

A recent article in Health Leaders provides an important reminder about the need for performance improvement experts to understand our data in more detail. Many hospitals formally evaluate various surgical quality measures, including the Surgical Care Improvement Project (Core Measures), complications, infections, readmissions, mortality, returns to the OR, returns to the ICU. However, these hospitals may not be differentiating between Emergency Surgery vs. Elective Surgery, a variable that can change the likelihood of complications considerably.