One of the great sights of spring is the number of people out walking and taking advantage of the great weather. Some people believe it is good therapy – both physically and mentally – to take a long walk. I tend to agree.

UMass Memorial Health Care has a program called Executive Rounding, which involves a bit of walking as well. Each week senior leaders take a walk, or round, for one hour in areas they don’t oversee in their daily responsibilities. This is an opportunity for our senior leaders to directly engage with our frontline caregivers to see firsthand the challenges they face on a daily basis.

We strive to be the executive team that makes decisions based on what we learn when we are on the floors with our caregivers not just from the pile of spreadsheets and reports that come across our desk.

When our senior leaders round they have three objectives:

• Listen and learn: Find out how our caregivers do their work and the problems they face
• Coach: Support and encourage their use of idea boards to drive innovation
• Answer questions: Find out what’s going on with their department/teams and how it impacts our health care system

When these senior leaders are in your areas, please do everything you can to make them feel welcome. I think you’ll find them to be a very dedicated group of people doing their best to make UMass Memorial a better place for you and our patients.

Our Idea of the Week comes from the UMass Memorial Medical Group. Quickly accessing information to help high-risk and high-need patients presented a challenge for staff at the Office of Clinical Integration (OCI). Many of these patients have behavioral health issues and and chronic illness. The OCI clinical care manager for the Mass Health Primary Care Payment Reform program (PCPR) and OCI project coordinator worked with Information Systems (IS)Department to load an easy- to-spot icon onto the desktop of care teams working with these patients. The icon, a red telephone, was installed on desktops at the seven PCPR practices. With one click, the icon links directly to a page with contact information for a number of insurance company care management programs, as well as other helpful resources. The team is also working with IS and other practice sites to expand usage of the easy-to-spot red phone icon. Well done!

You can now find the Idea of the Week archive by clicking the Idea System tab at the top of this page.

Thanks for all your great ideas and for taking great care of our patients and one another,

Eric