Q&A with Dwayne Keller: Improving performance improvement through culture and technology

At a time when workforce challenges are top of mind for healthcare system leaders, a deliberate focus on culture can help solve burnout — and drive performance improvement along the way.

Dwayne Keller, senior principal, high reliability consulting at Vizient sat down to discuss how the Learning and Engagement System (LENS) — a web-based interactive visual dashboard with real-time communication, feedback and updates — can help providers do just that.

Why are we seeing such high burnout among healthcare professionals?

Last year, the CDC released a report that found that nearly half of healthcare workers felt burned out in 2022 and just as many were looking for a new job. And we know that a smaller workforce, tighter capacity constraints and more complex illnesses — alongside an aging population — are driving much of the burnout healthcare professionals face today. A healthy cultural foundation can help healthcare systems foster employee engagement and improve wellbeing across teams, making it easier to weather these challenges.

What is LENS and how does it work?

LENS is a digital visual management system that helps increase transparency by simplifying communication in health systems with the goal to grow community, manage work and consistently deliver high reliability healthcare.

The visual board can be mounted in a central place for daily huddles, but also easily accessed by other devices, like cell phones. Team members can view the board from anywhere and text an idea or concern to the board and keep up with announcements, regardless of which shift they're on. Ultimately, LENS becomes part of the team's workflow, whereby daily operational issues are tracked visually and addressed quickly in daily huddles.

How can LENS help healthcare providers?

In my decades of implementing, training and coaching the use of a structured management system to support and sustain continuous improvement in safety-focused companies, one of the main obstacles was the time and effort necessary to keep visual daily management boards up to date. As a time saving measure, we emphasized handwriting current data on white boards.

But there are significant limitations to this method, such as limited space and the additional reliance on leaders to create, print and post trend charts ahead of daily huddles. More importantly, it is very challenging to leverage traditional boards for bi-directional communication and engagement. LENS doesn't have these limitations — it's updated regularly and visually tracks each input through to its resolution.

How does LENS help with culture and performance improvement?

Across the board, our providers have seen improvements in their safety climate, and their teams have an improved work/life balance and emotional wellbeing and show fewer signs of personal burnout. We also found that teams saw an improvement in their burnout climate by 5% for every 20 additional active users who logged into LENS each year between 2019 and 2020 — and that's even with a baseline measurement from before COVID. 

When frontline team members see the issues they bring up resolved or escalated for resolution, they feel heard and validated — and that builds trust and fosters a deeper relationship between frontline staff and leaders. As these staff are part of problem-solving and process improvement, it helps their unit and patients, and they gain a sense of accomplishment through influencing the environment in which they work, leading to overall improved engagement. And, culturally, when staff feel they can share personal experiences like vacation pictures via text, they build community. All of that is enabled by LENS.

Learn more about what it takes to be a high reliability organization and top performer in healthcare.