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.
Over the years, IHI has found safe and reliable health care systems have a few things in common: They proactively engage patients and families, they have a culture that drives (rather than hinders) safety, and they are excellent learners. To make it easier to understand and practice these concepts, a white paper from IHI and Safe & Reliable Healthcare lays out a helpful framework and visual. The new white paperprovides definitions and implementation strategies for nine interrelated components of safety and reliability. Why are safe systems so important? Open School case studies, such as ‘What Happened to Alex,’ are a powerful reminder.
Joe Kiani is a multimillionaire in the medical device industry, whom patient safety expert Dr. Peter Pronovost has called a visionary. In the past five years, Kiani has convinced 70 health technology companies — many of which are competitors — to sign a pledge to open their platforms. Although some large companies have been reluctant to participate, he persists because machines that can “talk to each other” could save lives, being better able to recognize real problems and ignore false alarms. According to Stat News, “His tech fix — if widely implemented — could bring order to the cacophony of beeps, buzzes, and blaring alarms.” Learn more about the dangers of alert fatigue from Dr. Bob Wachter in the Open School video library.
Our latest Open School blog post features projects related to community organizing that students presented at this year’s IHI National Forum. Through these projects, students leveraged skills taught in the Open School course on leadership and organizing for change. They applied lessons from the course to improve health on their university campuses, increase collaboration within their hospitals, advance interprofessional learning, or coordinate resources in their cities to improve access to care.
