In today’s ever-changing and complex environment, health care organizations face both common and unique challenges. Below are examples of how IHI can support your organization in tackling its most important challenges, with solutions customized for your needs and goals.
Safe, High-Quality Care During Transition
Challenge: Our organization just merged with another organization. How do we ensure the new organization is providing safe, high-quality care in this time of transition? How do we blend our institutional quality and safety cultures?
Solution: IHI can help by first understanding the performance of the two organizations prior to the merger and providing diagnostic services to understand the differences in quality and safety organizational culture. The diagnostic activity is designed to assess the organization in a variety of quality, safety, and clinical areas, and seeks to understand the quality and safety infrastructure of legacy systems. Solutions include guidance on creating a unified quality culture, leadership events that enable co-design of a new quality culture by key stakeholders, and dissemination support to ensure that the new quality culture is spread throughout the health system.
New Leadership Team
Challenge: We have a new leadership team and are struggling to determine how to meet the aggressive service quality, patient engagement, and patient safety objectives of our strategic plan.
Solution: IHI can support your leadership team in a variety of ways, including helping to shape your enterprise-wide quality, safety, and patient-engagement strategy. IHI can support the deployment of this strategy, or an existing one, throughout your system to ensure all quality activities are aligned to your enterprise-wide strategy. IHI also provides a set of tailored educational services for your board, executive leadership, departmental leadership, and frontline leaders in how to implement a quality-focused business strategy. We seek to meet you where you are in your journey and will make every attempt to understand the problem you are trying to solve before we make a recommendation.
Determine Organization-wide QI Skills
Challenge: On our journey toward becoming a high-reliable organization, we need some help figuring out the level of quality improvement skills and capabilities needed across the organization.
Solution: IHI’s “dosing approach” for quality improvement capability has been incredibly helpful in clarifying the varying level of QI expertise needed across an organization, and how to sequence the development of these key resources to meet your strategic aims.
Develop an Organizational Dashboard
Challenge: We need strategic support to develop an organizational dashboard to guide our journey toward becoming a high-reliable organization.
Solution: Overmeasurement is a key source of waste; undermeasurement leaves systems unable to improve. Defining a clear, concise set of measures that lead to systematic, year-on-year improvement in performance is a vexing challenge for all health systems. IHI can help analyze your present measures, data collection efforts, and dashboards to help maximize the value of measurement activities. Visual display of data is a critical step in the transformation to becoming a high-reliable organization. IHI can support you in selecting and defining key measures, building better data collection systems, creating opportunities to reflect on the data, and teaching leaders throughout the system how to manage the data to create better health outcomes for patients and families and better financial outcomes for the health system.
Engage Frontline Clinical Teams in QI
Challenge: Our organization needs to engage frontline clinical teams in quality improvement.
Solution: Engaging frontline teams is key to building sustainable changes. IHI employs methods such as value management and the Model for Improvement to engage frontline clinicians in problem-solving activities that they are already accustomed to using with patients every day. IHI can help determine if you are ready for frontline improvement methodologies and work with you to develop this important capability in your organization.
Address Recurring Safety Events
Challenge: In our large health system “safety events” occur time and time again, despite conducting many root cause analyses and implementing recommendations to address safety issues. How can IHI help us?
Solution: IHI’s RCA2 (Root Cause Analyses and Actions) methodology ensures a robust root cause analysis that yields real action and results that lead to sustainable systems-based improvements to make patient care safer in settings across the continuum of care. In addition, IHI can help design a systematic approach to improving key safety parameters using our whole system quality methodology, which combines actions at both the senior management and frontline levels to implement and sustain improved practices.
Advance Health Equity
Challenge: Our health care system wants to reduce health inequities in access, treatment, and outcomes. How do we align efforts across the organization to make an impact on improving health equity?
Solution: IHI offers a wide range of support tailored to your organization’s needs, whether you are seeking a strategic approach to begin your work to improve health equity or to accelerate and align existing efforts for greater impact. Our approach helps organizations understand their current context, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and aspirations for health equity. IHI will assess the current state of your organization’s equity work and work alongside you to propose a strategy and ideas for early wins. Longer term support is also available for organization’s seeking assistance with testing and implementing new approaches.
Focus on Specific Clinical Areas
Challenge: We need help with specific clinical and health-related topics. Does IHI provide this type of support?
Solution: In addition to providing improvement expertise, IHI has a robust cadre of clinical faculty who have advanced health and health care knowledge. IHI can provide support in numerous clinical and health-related topics, including areas of focus for our most recent work: age-friendly care, operationalizing social determinants of health, care for patients with complex needs, behavioral health, and maternal and infant care, among others.
