VALUE
IMPROVEMENT
LEADERS
TOPIC #3
539 words  | 3 minutes
THE VALUE SUMMARY
The value summary is University of Utah Health's online tool that leads improvers through the steps, tools, and proven method of improvement.
PRINCIPLE
Applying Utah’s value improvement methodology requires structure and consistency.

TOOL
The value summary is Utah’s version of the A3. A fill-in-the-blank online tool that helps you act your way into thinking about sustainable value improvement work. 

APPLICATION
Start a value summary for your project if you haven’t already. You may want your coach by your side.
Value Improvement Work Ain’t Easy

The previous article outlined the benefits of following a proven value improvement methodology, including the avoidance of leaping to solutions. For most long-time problem solvers, the methodology isn’t common sense. It must be learned and applied. The guide to applying our method is the value summary, an online tool that leads improvers through the steps, tools, and method of improvement.
Act Your Way Into Thinking

Recall those all-too-common issues that plague project teams and healthcare in general (no clear goals, not understanding the root causes, etc.). In fact they’re so common, they’re not even noticed, much less thought of as problems. These issues are pernicious and it’s certainly not enough to promise yourself to avoid them. 

Put another way, you can’t think your way into taking the right value improvement actions. This is where the value summary comes in: It helps you act your way into thinking the right way about value improvement.
The Many Purposes of a Value Summary

First and foremost, a value summary guides you and your team sequentially through our value improvement methodology. It asks questions about your team and your project scope. It even helps write your SMART goals (a topic so important, it has its own article). 

Goodbye PowerPoint: Your value summary serves as a progress report throughout the remaining five phases, prompting a standardized conversation: SMART goals, data that drove the decisions, and improvement elements. It contains your monitoring data, including your important process, outcome, and balance measures, and the financial impact of those metrics.

Lastly, the digital format makes it easy to share your work with the rest of the organization and keep a running tally of progress at the health system level.
The Value Summary is Inspired by the A3

When it comes to defining a project and recording progress, we’re following international best practice. The project charter + PowerPoint approach has been abandoned in favor of the succinct and standardized A3 format. A standardized format guides the user to completeness and brevity. 

A traditional A3 is an 11” x 17” piece of paper that contains all the information needed to summarize a value improvement project whether at the beginning, middle or end. We in the US call 11”x17” paper “ledger” but the rest of the world calls it A3. That’s right. The format is named after the size of paper it was written on, in part because the A3 originalists were adamant that A3’s be hand-written. 

We think we’ve improved upon the A3 with the electronic value summary. And in the spirit of continuous improvement, the current value summary, operating on an independent platform, is an innovation from its earlier incarnations.
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Accelerate | University of Utah | healthsciences.utah.edu/accelerate
Questions? Email:  kim.mahoney@hsc.utah.edu