June brings the start of summer, and the start of summer brings vacations. (Talk about joy in work!) Well-deserved vacations make it more challenging to keep up with all the new ideas, research, and stories in the quality and safety world, so here, ICYMI (in case you missed it) are IHI's top five picks from June 2016: 

• Sustaining Improvement, a new IHI White Paper. This white paper, which nearly 3,000 readers have viewed, presents a framework that health care organizations can use to sustain improvements in the safety, effectiveness, and efficiency of patient care. The key to sustaining improvement is to focus on the daily work of frontline managers, supported by a high-performance management system that prescribes standard tasks and responsibilities for managers at all levels of the organization. Next month, we’ll publish a short video with one of the paper’s authors.

• Addressing the opioid crisis in the United States, a new IHI Innovation Report. This 25-page innovation report on the worsening opioid crisis:
  
  • Identifies four primary drivers to reduce opioid use
  • Highlights gaps in current efforts that underscore the need for a coordinated and collaborative community-wide response
  • Proposes a high-level construct for a systems approach at the community level to address the US opioid crisis.
  Check out the full report or, if you’re crunched for time, check out the related Health Affairs blog post. 

• Sticking with the topic of the opioid crisis, WIHI took a slightly different angle, with “Nurturing Trust: Addiction and Maternal and Newborn Health.” The program, which aired on June 2, featured three innovative programs — one from California, one from Oregon, and one from New Hampshire — changing the way pregnant mothers struggling with addiction interact with the health care system. Here on the WIHI archive page, which nearly 1,000 IHI customers have visited, you’ll find a recording of the show, slides from the show, and a short video featuring two members of the IHI innovation team.
  
• In June’s most popular blog post, Mark Murray, MD, MPA, argues that improving access doesn’t mean increasing workload. Nearly 4,000 readers have visited the interview-style post that includes this helpful analogy: “[Let’s say] my brother has a credit card debt of $5,000. Every month he gets a new bill. He pays off the interest, plus any new charges accrued. Next month, he’s still got a bill of $5,000. That’s his backlog. In order to pay off his credit card balance, he’s got to pay off the interest, any new accrued charges, plus the existing $5,000 accumulated debt. Appointments are like that. Physicians have to pay off their appointment debt by working harder for a temporary period of time until they see all the patients waiting to be seen. Once they eliminate the backlog, implementing advanced access practices helps keep demand and supply in balance …”
  
• What is better? Lean or the IHI approach to Quality Improvement? How can you decide what works best for your organization? In a new video, Comparing Lean and Quality Improvement, IHI's Gareth Parry offers some interesting perspective in a short (1:28) video. “What we’ve also been learning is there’s an awful lot of similarity,” Parry says. “Both methods recognize that all change is local.” While you’re there, subscribe to IHI’s YouTube channel to get immediate access to all of the videos we create.