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.
About 20 years ago, IHI’s Don Goldmann was in charge of preventing hospital-acquired infections at Boston Children’s Hospital. One day, the CEO offered him a promotion to Medical Director of Quality Improvement. He agreed, on one condition: that he would be able to approach QI from both an academic and applied perspective. “I’ve continued to operate under the theory that academics and quality improvers mutually benefit from working together,” Goldmann writes in a new blog post. It’s the same approach he brings as faculty on a new massive open online course, PH556X: Practical Improvement Science in Health Care.Sign up for the free course by January 20.
Austin Frakt is a prodigious blogger for The New York Times. How has he accomplished so much? In a post on “The Upshot,” Frakt explains his method. Spoiler alert: It sounds a lot like plan-do-study-act (PDSA) cycles. He suggests you start with two questions: “Why don’t I do this already?” and “Why do I feel the need to do this now?” Based on what you learn, plan a month-long test of the change you think will make a difference. Then, see how you think it went. For further help using the Model for Improvement, check out the IHI Open School exercise, Improve Yourself in the New Year.
Community Updates
Welcome, New Chapters
Misr University for Science and Technology, Giza, Egypt
Thinking about planning an event with your Chapter this spring? One Chapter has some creative ideas — from studying a true tragedy to simulating a “patient room of horrors.” This October, the IHI Open School Chapter at the University of Colorado Anschutz held its first-ever patient safety week. The Chapter’s interprofessional leadership team showed a film about a young man who lost his life to unsafe care and created a Halloween-themed activity for students to point out unsafe conditions in a patient’s “room of horrors.” The event landed the Chapter in the news at CU Anschutz Today.
Mark your calendar for the next Global Chapter call on Friday, January 22, at 12 PM ET. You won’t want to miss this special call, led by Dr. Greg Ogrinc, Director of the Quality Literature Program and Senior Associate Dean for Medical Education at Dartmouth Medical School. Dr. Ogrinc will lend his expertise on publishing your QI work in peer-reviewed journals — covering the components of SQUIRE, the must-have format for QI writing, and other best practices for publishing. Learn more here.
