We don’t lack ideas in healthcare, we lack a reliable way to catch them. Every day, a great suggestion flickers by in a Zoom or Teams Meeting. At least one participant asks a question or brings up a point that gets lost in the back and forth group discussion. A clever workaround gets mentioned at huddle, or a discovery for a better process happens in a hallway conversation and then disappears into the rush of the next urgent problem to solve or patient to care for. By the afternoon, no one can find the message, and by next week no one remembers who said it. The idea wasn’t bad. It was just homeless.
Here’s the problem in one sentence: These days, we often treat conversations as fleeting when they’re actually valuable; without a simple way to move ideas from chat to decision, they never reach the people who can act. Add on to that production pressure, reducing turn overtimes in the operating room because the second case went long and the third surgeon is behind in clinic appointments, and it’s easy to see why so much gets lost in the noise.
If you’ve worked a single week in a hospital, you’ve seen this. A perioperative scheduling nurse points out a logistic hiccup that will slow down cases tomorrow. An anesthesia colleague mentions a small tweak to the block setup that cut turnovers on Monday. A nurse notices that new patients feel less nauseated when the anesthesia technique is used in a certain way. None of these insights require a committee or a white paper. They just need to land on the right desk with enough context for someone to say, “let’s do that.”
So, imagine a very small change. You pick three places where good ideas already appear—maybe the daily perioperative huddle, the anesthesia Teams channel for “wins and opportunities” thread, and the pharmacy rounds. Those meetings can (and often are) recorded or summarized by various AI tools on existing platforms many organizations already use. From an organization’s culture standpoint, you add one expectation everyone can live with: at the end, someone names the one or two ideas worth carrying forward. It creates engagement and empowerment.
Reviewing the analysis of the transcript and using AI tools to bubble to the surface can help tease out a signal. Our office tools today already can generate a task and a short note that can go to the person who can do something about it. Then you can build a process that creates a follow up reminder within a couple of days, and you can iterate on improvements within a couple of weeks. That’s it. A humble little conveyor belt from talk to action.
The first week you try this, nothing dramatic happens. You capture three ideas. One is a duplicate, one is too fuzzy, and one is a quick win. You tune the ask: “If we only saved one thing from this conversation, what would it be?” Be curious and encourage others to start answering more precisely. The second week, a pattern pops out: instruments,prep and preference cards might have variances that could be improved, which keeps nudging first cases later and later. Now the person who owns that problem can see it clearly, and they fix it. Suddenly the morning feels a little less chaotic.
In my recent conversations with organizational leaders I often get asked, “How will we know it’s working?” You’ll know because decisions get faster and quieter. The same problems stop bouncing between departments. The weekly recap shifts from “here’s what people said” to “here’s what changed.” If you want numbers, pick simple ones you can explain without a dashboard: time from idea to decision, the count of cross-department fixes, a couple of before-and-after outcomes that matter to patients and staff. The goal isn’t a report. The goal is momentum.
You don’t need fancy software to start. Use the tools you already have. Let your meeting platforms create transcripts if that helps but resist the temptation to drown in them. Store the notes where your teams already live. Route the ideas with the simplest task manager or tracker you can stand. Send a short Friday note that says, “These are the three ideas we carried forward and where they went.” Shiny systems can come later. A trustworthy habit today beats a perfect platform someday.
Culture will make or break this. The habit is wonderfully small: begin meetings with “what do we want this to produce?” and end them with “what’s the one thing worth carrying forward, and who needs it?” When leaders reliably acknowledge and decide, people keep sending good ideas. When leaders go silent, the conveyor belt stops and the ideas go back to dying in chat.
If you’re picturing this in your world—perioperative, education, pharmacy, patient flow—start tiny. Pick a few conversations where sparks already fly. Name one person who will collect the sparks and one person who will route them. Tell everyone what you’re doing and why. Celebrate the first fix loudly, even if it’s delightfully boring. In a month, you’ll have a handful of small wins. In a quarter, you’ll have a different rhythm. In a year, you’ll wonder how you ever tolerated the old way.
The truth is simple and a little uncomfortable: the distance between “someone said something smart” and “we changed how we work” is often one clear handoff. Build that handoff, protect it with trust, and keep score with common sense. The rest is just practice.