Surfing the Healthcare Tsunami: Bring Your Best Board

Taking examples from high reliability industries such as auto racing, aviation, manufacturing, and even government, Surfing the Healthcare Tsunami provides leadership role models to help healthcare surf the impending tsunami of waste and harm.

Surfing the Healthcare Tsunami: Bring Your Best Board®

Our series of inspirational documentaries highlight “extraordinary impact through ordinary things.” The messages will provide a call to action for all people interested in healthcare to repair, develop, and enhance the invisible safety net that keeps patients and caregivers safe.

They include stories, such as that of movie actor Dennis Quaid’s newborn twins’ near-fatal medical error, as a way of engaging audiences to become aware of the great role model organizations that are making care safe.

This documentary is the second in a series of more than five that are in the TMIT productions pipeline. To view the first documentary, also originally broadcasted on the Discovery Channel, Chasing Zero: Winning the War on Healthcare Harm, click here.

    What:

  • A 53-minute-long made-for-TV documentary entitled Surfing the Healthcare Tsunami: Bring Your Best Board® has been produced for global audiences. After the last broadcast on the Discovery Channel, the documentary and a toolbox of multimedia resources will be distributed for free by TMIT and its collaborating organizations to the chairmen of healthcare organization governance boards, their CEOs, quality leaders, and nursing leaders at hospitals around the globe.
  • The global crisis of harm and waste will be addressed. Our goal must be to move from harm to healing and from waste to value as hospitals move from a provider-centered, volume-driven care to a person-centered, value-driven care.
  • The target demographics are consumers and hospital leaders. The objective will be to inspire the audience to act in their own communities or at their own hospitals.
  • Great care and safe care exist at the intersection of leadership, practices, and technologies. An invisible safety net comprised of these three threads keeps patients and caregivers safe.
  • Stories from aviation, government, and industry demonstrate the “4 Ts of Leadership” – how great leaders engage the head and heart to move the hands to action and the voice to teaching from within through Truth, Trust, Teamwork, and Training.
  • The focus of this documentary is on the boardroom, where resources are allocated, policies are set, vision is crafted, and accountabilities are defined that determine healthcare safety-net systems.
  • Engaged leaders, practices that deliver predictable outcomes, and adoption of technologies that support leadership-driven practices will be illustrated in each documentary.
  • The 5 Rights of Imaging™, a free public-domain framework, is presented as an example of an opportunity for non-clinical trustees and consumers to understand how we can reduce overuse, under-use, and misuse of imaging to reduce waste and harm while optimizing the value of innovations.
  • Many hours of content, including digital short stories and concept messages, will be continuously added to an Internet streaming distribution system as a toolbox of assets to help hospitals pursue zero harm and help families optimize their care.

    Who:

  • Terrific front-line caregivers, subject matter experts, and leaders who are wonderful role models from healthcare, government, community, and quality organizations tell their stories.
  • Role model leaders from other industries such as manufacturing, auto racing, aviation, and hospitality sectors who were interviewed about their methods teach us through their stories.
  • The consumer target audience members for the documentary are CFOs – the “Chief Family Officers” in our communities: soccer moms and grandmothers, who make more than 70% of the healthcare decisions. One in four cares for someone else, and 80% of the caregivers are women.

    When:

  • The first premiere was hosted in Washington, DC, on April 27, 2012, at the National Press Club for an audience of 250 leaders.
  • A Texas premiere was held hosted in Austin, on May 3, 2012, for 700 hospital leaders, at the Bass Concert Hall.
  • A private screening was held for experts from Harvard and from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA, on May 16, 2012.
  • A screening was hosted for experts from Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, OH, on May 23, 2012.
  • A screening was hosted in Chicago, IL, on June 6, 2012 for administrative and clinical leaders with emphasis on opportunities to help safety net hospitals.
  • A future premiere of the “director’s cut” of the film and highlights from the toolbox will be hosted at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA, in October 2012.
  • A global screening in support of the Partnership for Patients will be hosted in Los Angeles, CA in the third quarter of 2012.
  • The film was broadcasted on the Discovery Channel April 28, May 5, May 12, and May 19, 2012.
  • The documentary is provided free on demand on the following websites: Discovery CME, this site and page on www.SafetyLeaders.org, and on Apple’s iTunes U.

    Why:

  • Most patient safety documentaries and stories delivered through mass media either provide a very depressing and sobering picture of U.S. healthcare, or highlight technological breakthroughs that are unavailable for front-line hospitals.
  • This documentary is intended to be a call to action for everyone by providing real-world opportunities to improve today, rather than to wait until tomorrow. It provides great role models who have faced the tsunami of waste and harm and are leveraging the power of the wave to deliver great care, hope, and healing.
  • The funders of this documentary are TMIT, the Denham Family Fund, and General Electric Corporation. In that this is a continuing education program, General Electric has had no editorial control nor influence on pre-production, production, nor post-production of the documentary. It will be provided to the general public and academic organizations after broadcast for educational purposes. Speakers on the TMIT site SpeakerLink®, for matching patient advocate speakers and healthcare “seekers,” will be trained as screeners of the documentary to accelerate outreach to communities through public events.

    Disclosures:

  • A grant of $750,000 by General Electric Corporation (GE) provided less than one-third of the funding of the program and toolbox. TMIT, HCC Corporation, and the Denham Family Fund provided the balance of the funding. No characters, experts, or patients in the film were paid to be in the film directly or indirectly. All images and video were captured directly by TMIT, were licensed as stock content, or were public domain. No video or images were provided by General Electric or any other supplier corporation.
  • HCC Corporation and Dr. Denham provide services to GE. All speaking subjects provide full disclosure details following a rigorous framework for Continuing Medical Education and Continuing Education Unit provision.
  • Surfing the Healthcare Tsunami was edited on January 25, 2016 when TMIT discovered that one of the participants did not uphold what we consider to be role model leadership principles. That participant was removed and the original message of the film is still intact. We recommend that viewers use only the most recent streaming version of the documentary available on this page.