My First HSPI Conference And What I Came Away With

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Health Systems Process Improvement Conference (HSPI) by the Society of Health Systems (SHS). HSPI, as its name implies, is geared towards any and all individuals who are working to improve the state of our healthcare system. While I had known the about the conference the last few years, several factors had prevented me from going. This year however, I finally decided to make it work and regret not doing it sooner. As I reflect on my experience, here are my main takeaways:

The Talent And Passion In Our Industry

With around 100 presentations, 60 poster presentations, and a number of other learning activities, it's hard to miss all of the talent and passion out there working to improve healthcare delivery. Whether it is the implementation of lean management systems, improving safety through human factors, addressing the emotional side of change, or improving operations with analytical models, it always amazes me how teams can go deep into a messy problem, develop a novel solution, and passionately report out their results.

Are Our Systems Set Up With The Patient In Mind?

And yet while it’s important to ensure our organizations are effective and efficient in care delivery, we need to make sure that we keep the patients we serve at the center of our attention. As Dr. Montori led in with his keynote speech, our systems are currently designed to accidentally care and be incidentally cruel to our patients. It shouldn’t be acceptable that people sound like they won the lottery when they had a great visit in our systems, it should be an expectation.

Networking Opportunities

While I was able to take away several items from the presentations, it’s clear that there is an enormous amount of value in building connections and having conversations with other professionals. It is not every day that you are able to sit down for an entire three days with like-minded individuals with a diverse amount of experience to discuss problems and innovations in the healthcare environment.  

Whether it was a casual conversation after a presentation, structured networking questions with other professionals, or over drinks at a hole-in-the-wall seafood restaurant, there is priceless value that you get out of these conversations that can benefit you and those around you.

New Friends and Connections

The greatest part about technology is that it can help people connect across the globe with ease, however that may mean you’re just connecting via a conference line. After working with my academic advisers, student colleagues, and other volunteers in the young professional community, all entirely virtually, I was thankful to finally make a human connection with them, because while we all enjoy problem solving we need to remember that the human connections we make are what ultimately drives improvement forward.

Developing New Talent

As I sat in on presentations, walked through the poster hall, and received questions on a panel geared toward students hoping breaking into healthcare, I recognized that there is an enormous amount of student talent out there, all of who are motivated to help improve care delivery for the patients we serve. As leaders within our healthcare systems, it is up to us to help build bridges for new talent into our organizations whether that is advocating for an internship role in our department or being open to mentoring them as they build their skill set and prepare to enter the real world.

What’s Next?

Now while sitting in sunny Savannah, Georgia getting ready to head back to the cold state of Wisconsin, I’m thinking of Isaac Mitchell’s opening address and his homework he gave to us on day one to identify something to bring back to my organization.

While I can easily identify a few tools I learned and plan on applying them as early as this week, I keep thinking about Alex Knight’s keynote address during which he challenged us to have the confidence to appreciate the complex systems in which we work, to stop polishing non-bottlenecks in and confront the entire system at once rather than looking at local optimums in order to truly improve the system as a whole. As I head back into my work this week, I plan on challenging my organization to do just that.

What do you plan on bringing back?

?Notes: as more content is released in the following days of the conference, I plan on updating this post with relevant links and media.