Institute for Healthcare Improvement: IHI Open School

IHI Open School for Health Professions

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Attend IHI’s National Forum

Scholarships for students, residents, and others are now available for the 20th Annual National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care on December 8-11, 2008, in Nashville, Tennessee. Because more students will be attending than ever before, IHI has planned many student-centered events to help make the Forum an invaluable experience for you. Events include:

The National Forum Clarion Case Study Competition
'Student Track’ of sessions
National Forum student mentor matching

Download the complete schedule of student events for more information.

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At-a-Glance

Who: Improvement-minded students and teachers from multiple disciplines, with support from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)

What: A vibrant educational community focused on quality improvement and patient safety

Where: Online and on campus

When: At your convenience

Why: Because patients deserve safe, reliable care

The Gap Between What Is and What Could Be

Why the IHI Open School?

Although in many ways the US health care system is the best in the world, too often it fails to deliver high-quality care. As our nation’s most trusted advisor on science, the Institute of Medicine (IOM), declared, “Between the health care we have and the care we could have lies not just a gap, but a chasm.” In its landmark 2001 report, Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health Care System for the 21st Century, the IOM identified six urgent “Aims for Improvement” of health care in America:

Safety: Reduce the harm done to patients by errors in care — defects that, according to the IOM, kill between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans each year in hospitals alone;
Effectiveness: Promise patients that they will receive evidence-based care, always, and that they will not be subjected to care that cannot help them;
Patient-Centeredness: Redesign care to restore dignity, self-esteem, and control to patients and families who too often feel helpless, forgotten, and unheard;
Timeliness: Reduce the waiting and delays that pervade health care for both patients and providers;
Efficiency: Recover a substantial portion of the money wasted in health care through administrative complexity, unnecessary procedures, and lack of coordination; and
Equity: Close the racial and socio-economic gaps in health status, access, and outcomes.

The IHI Open School for Health Professions, which will launch officially in September 2008, aims to close this gap by advancing quality improvement and patient safety competencies in the next generation of health professionals. This important goal is not currently fulfilled by the curriculum at most health professions schools.

The IHI Open School will provide a unique integrated educational community for students across multiple disciplines: medicine, nursing, dentistry, pharmacy, health care administration, and other allied health professions. Drawing on faculty who are recognized nationally and globally as health care quality leaders, it is “the other school,” in which you can enroll on a voluntary basis while attending the physical professional school of your choice.

There will be no fees associated with enrollment in the IHI Open School, and the resources will be targeted to all levels of learning — whether you have limited experience with quality improvement or patient safety issues, or want to sharpen skills you have already begun to develop.

Students participating in the IHI Open School will learn from and interact with like-minded individuals from all health professions, both online and in person. Members will be able to access resources and engage in learning through a variety of media and modalities. Online programs will include case studies, podcasts, videos, and interactive learning modules.

IHI will also host free monthly activities, such as student-facilitated conference calls and webcasts featuring national patient safety and quality improvement experts. Face-to-face events will range from meetings of local school Chapters to national meetings at conferences such as IHI’s Annual National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care. Scholarship opportunities are available for students, residents, college/university faculty, and deans interested in attending the IHI’s annual National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care.

Advisory Group

A special thanks to all of those who participated in our Advisory Group and provided valuable feedback and ideas during the development of the IHI Open School.

NOTE: These web pages will be continuously updated, both to add new content and to reflect your input. We welcome your emails at openschool@ihi.org to let us know how the site might better meet your needs.