It’s December, the Forum is behind us (whew!), and we’re heading into our annual winter break here at IHI. Every year, the IHI office in Cambridge, MA, USA, closes for a week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. In the spirit of what we call One IHI, we all take a break together, giving everyone a chance to put work aside and return refreshed in the New Year, without an avalanche of unread email. It’s a great time to reflect back on the year in the student movement for quality and safety. It ... read full post

Lisa Miller, an MPH student at Oregon Health and Sciences University, recently completed the IHI Open School Practicum. Her project focused on helping clinic staff at a primary care clinic document patients’ social needs in the electronic medical record, so that clinic staff could address them along with patients’ medical needs. The project was a success (by the end of the work, 100 percent of patients seen by behavioral health staff had their social needs documented in the designated chart loca ... read full post

Rachel Hathaway, MD, is an internal medicine resident at the Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA). During the last academic year, she and seven other residents participated in a pilot initiative to teach residents how to apply quality improvement methodology through hands-on, year-long projects. The group was fortunate to work with Dr. Maren Batalden — the daughter of legendary quality improver Paul Batalden — who served as mentor and course director. We asked Rachel some questions about the team’s e ... read full post

It’s the time of year when the IHI Open School checks in with our more than 700 Chapters worldwide. Each year, we ask each Chapter to submit a Chapter Progress Report, to help us understand what you’ve accomplished and what the Open School team can do to support you. Be sure to have your voice heard, and submit your report this year by June 1. To show you why this matters, we thought we’d share some of our learnings from last year’s Chapter Progress Reports. Here’s what you said you needed fro ... read full post

Editor’s Note Colleen McCormick is a fifth-year medical student in the combined MD/MPH Physician Leadership Development Program at Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine in Dayton, Ohio. For two months she used the IHI Open School Quality Improvement Practicum to conduct her first quality improvement project. In this final blog post, Colleen reflects on her project and her progress as a student trying to make a change in the health care system. You can catch up on her previous po ... read full post