How can quality improvement concepts help in your daily life?

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

I’m smirking because anything from just my daily life with my family and [thinking] “What can we PDSA to improve?” Not to say that we are streamlined and efficient in everything that we do, but I definitely think that a wise strategy for most things is to test on a small scale, see if something works, and spread. And I think that has application not just in health care but for your commute to work, for the golf game that we talk about, for knowing if my wife can handle getting my kids to two or three different activities within a two hour timespan, or do I actually need to come home early from work and help her with getting the kids where they need to be. So I would say that it’s really become almost a philosophy that I live by. There’s nothing that shouldn’t continue to be improved.

I think our work with the Open School has the same vein. We do a lot of tests of change. And I think we do a very good job of not approaching putting content for the Open School out there like we are the experts, and we know for sure that this will work. But we actually take the frame of testing it on a small scale, seeing what’s effective, and spreading it from there. And I just think that should be applied across many domains of life.