Institute for Healthcare Improvement: Pursuing Perfection

An Overview of Pursuing Perfection

Pursuing Perfection organizations are redesigning their systems to create dramatic improvements in all of their major care processes. "Pursuing perfection" means working at three levels:

Leadership
New designs and innovations
Results at the front line

The program was developed in response to the Institute of Medicine’s two landmark reports, To Err Is Human and Crossing the Quality Chasm, which reveal a gap between what is known and what is practiced in health care. Recognizing that patient care is not nearly as good as it should be, IHI and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation set out to build new models that could bridge this gap and bring about a dramatic transformation in health care delivery.

Learn more about Pursuing Perfection
Learn more about the areas each Pursuing Perfection organization has targeted for improvement
Learn more about setting raise-the-bar aims for improvement to achieve dramatically better results

The 2006 AHA-McKesson Quest for Quality Prize Awarded to Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center

Congratulations to Pursuing Perfection site Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, the recipient of the 2006 Quest for Quality Prize!

According to the American Hospital Association-McKesson, the goals of the Quest for Quality Prize are to "raise awareness of the need for an organization-wide commitment to highly reliable, exceptional quality, patient-centered care; reward successful efforts to develop and promote a systems-based approach toward improvements in quality of care; inspire organizations to systematically integrate and align their quality improvement efforts throughout the organization; and communicate successful programs and strategies to the hospital field."

More information about the work in patient involvement at Cincinnati Children's can be found in the October 2006 edition of the Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Safety.

To read more stories from Pursuing Perfection sites, please scroll down towards the bottom of this page.

Modern Healthcare Series

Pursuing Perfection Success Stories

In this five-part series, Modern Healthcare featured an in-depth look at the Pursuing Perfection initiative and the participating organizations.

Read all five of the articles

No Toyota yet, but a start: A cadre of providers seeks to transform an inefficient industry (January 31, 2005)
Team effort: McLeod uses "patient rounds," leadership meetings to boost quality (February 7, 2005)
Quality in an academic setting: Cincinnati Children's teams execs, physicians, families to improve care systems (February 14, 2005)
When quality means business: NJ hospital finds that efficiency and effectiveness of care add to the bottom line (February 21, 2005)
The pursuit continues: Project provides a blueprint for transformation (February 28, 2005)

IHI invites you to read about all of the Pursuing Perfection projects to learn about impressive results in safety, mortality, and costs.

Other Articles and Stories

HealthPartners in Minnesota Helps Shape Hospital Medicine

Hospitalists at HealthPartners Medical Group are pursuing many avenues of clinical improvement, including national initiatives (such as the Pursuing Perfection program and the 100,000 Lives Campaign) and teaching. Read more in the March 2006 issue of The Hospitalist (see story on page 29).

National Business Group on Health Honors HealthPartners with 2006 Award for Excellence and Innovation in Value Purchasing

HealthPartners Medical Group and Clinics, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the largest consumer governed non-profit health care organization in the United States, has just received recognition for its innovative programs that measure and reward quality health care.

Tallahassee Memorial Hospital Reduces Surgical Site Infections

As a Pursuing Perfection organization, Tallahassee Memorial Hospital in Tallahassee, Florida, has added to its mélange of improvement work by joining IHI's 100,000 Lives Campaign and by participating in IHI's Collaborative on Reducing Surgical Site Infections. Consequently, they have seen some significant improvments in the hospital's surgical site infection rates.

Two Premier Pursuing Perfection health care organizations have become nationally recognized top performers

McLeod Regional Medical Center in Florence, South Carolina, and Hackensack University Medical Center in Hackensack, New Jersey, have both emerged as top performers in two high profile health care initiatives. From year one results, these were the only organizations that were top performers in all five focus areas of the CMS/Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration Project (HQID): Acute Myocardial Infarction, Heart Failure, Coronary Artery Bypass Graft, Pneumonia, and Hip and Knee Replacement.

Large-scale system change improves outcomes: The Pursuing Perfection program

This article describes the interim results of a the Pursuing Perfection program aimed at achieving unprecedented improvements in health care outcomes and to discuss the implications for other ambitious, organization-wide improvement efforts.

The Journey to Organizational Transformation: Interviews with Three Pursuing Perfection CEOs