What are some good books for learning about health care improvement?

James Moses, MD, MPH; Medical Director of Quality Improvement, Boston Medical Center

I had people at the first year of my job asking me about quality improvement (QI), I started to think, “Where can I go to get this information?” Obviously, the Open School was something that came up, but it was Langley’s book, The Improvement Guide, that I grabbed. And that really was my Bible until I basically assimilated the skills and the knowledge, until now. At this point I kind of just know what to do. When I didn’t know what to do, that was the thing I basically referred other people to, and I would reference with regularity to help guide my early projects, so that I really understood the concepts that I was basically using in the projects early on to get improvement to happen. Complications by Atul Gawande. The House of God. There are a couple of key books out there that talk about how our system is not right. And as I was starting my quality journey, those books did play a role in sparking my interest and realizing our system wasn’t perfect, and we needed methodology that was going to allow us to improve our system of care.