Running Shoes

My latest news is that Muppet Corporate asked me to officially become the Chicago region's representative for the corporate Lean Six Sigma steering committee. The LSS Committee is actually pretty neat, despite my being so very green at all of this. I'm literally only a Green Belt (the three other reps from the other areas have years of study as Black Belts), but this is giving me a chance to further develop my teaching and leadership skills as I add the "lean" or "improvement" dimension to projects all over the place. I'll be doing a site visit to St. Piggy's here in a few weeks, especially because the new electronic medical record rollout (Epic) requested the help of the Lean Six Sigma team.

Hey, it's all resume-building material and I really enjoy it. Just the other day, I lead another patient throughput brainstorm, this time on the inpatient side. It was an *animated* conversation and all sorts of sidebar problems emerged. I filled up 6 pages of newsprint, just scribing the ideas for further discussion. I'm excited because the ER Throughput focus is commonplace around the country. Everyone's doing that. However, the inpatient throughput angle is new and we may be pioneers...no one is really doing anything about it yet and there's a definite need. It'll take hours and hours to organize this initiative, but if there's one thing EVOO has taught me so far, it's to run at problems. If you see a problem that needs to be fixed, run at it and do everything you can to fix it yourself.

He claims that's how careers are made. I agree, but am still learning the balance of which problems I can fix and which I just need to identify and then hand off to someone else to fix.

Plus, I have a feeling I'm going to need better running shoes!