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.
HealthPartners, an integrated health system in Minnesota, United States, has been working on improving health disparities since the Institute of Medicine identified equity as one of the aims for health care improvement in its 2001 report, Crossing the Quality Chasm. In this video, Dr. Beth Averbeck explains HealthPartners’ goal for reducing disparities and how a test of change resulted in improvement.
The belief that money is no object when it comes to health care is quickly going out of style. What’s in style? Learning how to have difficult conversations with patients about costs of care. “In a stark departure from the past,” says Kaiser Health News, “the vast majority of the country’s medical schools now integrate discussions of cost, value, and effectiveness into their curricula.” How are students and residents juggling this new type of education along with everything else? Read the article and then explore the topic in greater detail in QCV 100: An Introduction to Quality, Cost, and Value in Health Care.
Community Updates
Welcome, New Chapters
Pneumology Hospital, Iasi, Romania
University of Louisiana Lafayette, Lafayette, LA, USA
Have you been counting down to this year’s IHI National Forum since last December? Or are you new to all this quality and safety stuff? Whether this will be first Forum or your fifth, here are three ways students and residents can score deep discounts (or a free ride) to attend the 27th Annual National Forum in Orlando, Florida, December 6-9.
Write 500 words about a QI project you’ve done or want to do. The David Calkins Memorial Scholarship awards one QI up-and-comer a free registration to the Forum and $1,000 toward expenses. Deadline: October 9
Share a storyboard. In addition to the satisfaction of sharing your improvement work, you could be one of four student storyboard presenters to receive free conference admission. Deadline: October 15
Sign up for a discounted rate just because. Students, residents, and full-time faculty are automatically eligible for academic scholarships.
To learn more about all of these opportunities and special programming for students and Open School learners at the Forum, click here.
For Open School Northeast Regional Leader Dr. Ross Hilliard, an attending physician at Brown University, quality improvement isn’t so much a personal interest as it is a personal responsibility. “Health professionals are human beings working in an imperfect system,” he writes, “and I feel we all have an obligation to improve these systems so we are able to provide the care we would all like to give every day.”In a new blog post, Ross describes the patient safety event — which happened early in his medical training — that continues to drive his work today. He also shares his advice for Chapters and his love of musical theater.
