Video Transcript: Personal Improvement Projects

Don Berwick, MD, MPP, FRCP, Institute for Healthcare Improvement

So we've asked you to pick a personal project. By now I hope you have an aim statement. Now how would you know if a change is an improvement or not? Jot down some possible measurements if you like, but know, we're going to spend some more time focused on measurement.

Back to the projects I mentioned to you earlier, for example, my student who was working on his backpack weight, he used an outcome measure, pounds, and some process measures, the number of books in the backpack. And he had a balancing measure. He was measuring whether he ever was missing an item that he actually needed.

With my project on spending more time at home with my family, more dinners. I spoke with my wife and my kids to help figure out what I should track over time. They told me really clearly that they really missed me at dinner time and that weekend days were much more important to them than weekdays. So whether I left on a trip late at night or early next morning, that didn't matter much to them. So that led me to my measurement plan. I counted and I tracked the number of dinners missed and the number of weekend days that I was away.