The IHI Open School is an innovative learning community where you can take free online courses, earn certificates, network with peers and experts, and gain confidence and skills in quality improvement and patient safety to change health care. Receive our newsletter from a friend? Click here to sign up.
Understanding variation is critical when you’re working to improve a process or system. In a new activity, you’ll learn to distinguish between two types of variation: common cause and special cause. (And you’ll get to eat candy!) We’ve created two videos to help you facilitate this activity. In the first, David Williams gives instructions on how to play; in the second, he explains what you’ll learn about variation and how it applies in real quality improvement work. Learn more in QI 104: Interpreting Data: Run Charts, Control Charts, and Other Measurement Tools.
Dr. Louis M. Profeta is an emergency physician, but he doesn’t believe his job is any more important than a chef’s. In a provocative post on LinkedIn, he describes how his secret to avoiding burnout is keeping in mind that his work is “just a job” — work that provides an important social value and also allows him to provide for his family. “We are just one profession out of countless others that keep our world moving,” Dr. Profeta writes. “We are no more a hero than the single mom working overnight as a custodian, trying to feed her kids.”
Students will have a special opportunity to hear from Dr. Abraham Verghese, bestselling author of the novel Cutting for Stone, in an intimate setting at the IHI Open School Chapter Congress on Monday, December 5, from 4–7 PM as part of the IHI National Forum. Dr. Verghese and Dr. Don Berwick will discuss their careers in medicine and their views of health care as a higher calling. Learn more about the 75 percent scholarship for students and register here.
Students will have a special opportunity to hear from 
