Implementar un enfoque de sistema integral para la mejora de la calidad.
El enfoque de Calidad del Sistema Integral (WSQ, por sus siglas en inglés) del IHI ayuda a los sistemas de salud a fortalecer su desempeño y a construir las estructuras y prácticas de gestión necesarias para satisfacer las necesidades cambiantes, mitigar los riesgos y promover una atención segura, confiable y centrada en el paciente a través de la mejora continua de la calidad.
Is Your Organization Trapped in a Cycle of Reacting to Quality and Safety Issues?
Many health systems struggle with variation, fragmented priorities, and reactive approaches to quality and safety.
What is Whole System Quality?
Whole System Quality (WSQ) offers an integrated framework combining quality planning, control, and improvement to foster ongoing organizational excellence. This approach is designed to help health systems shift from "reactive quality"— where quality departments come to the rescue after an adverse event occurs — to a proactive stance, enabling an entire organization to reliably meet the evolving needs of patients and the workforce.
Why Organizations Choose Whole System Quality
Quality Planning (QP)
Quality planning establishes the groundwork for dependable results by identifying stakeholder needs, defining aims, and designing the systems and processes to meet them from the outset.
As the foundation of WSQ, QP:
- Identifies stakeholder needs and defines quality aims
- Designs systems and processes to meet those needs from the outset
- Establishes measures and goals to assess performance
By embedding quality in design, quality planning helps prevent problems before they occur.
Quality Control (QC)
Quality control is the day-to-day work of monitoring performance and maintaining reliable operations, using data over time, visual management, and huddles to solve emerging issues in real time.
As the operational discipline within WSQ, QC:
- Monitors results against defined aims and standards
- Identifies and addresses variation or defects as they occur
- Responds in real time to risks to patient safety
These practices promote day-to-day consistency and reduce unintended variation.
Quality Improvement (QI)
Quality improvement is the systematic work of changing systems to achieve better results using the Science of Improvement and methods such as the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle. This enables teams to test changes, build capability, and improve outcomes.
As the method for advancing performance within WSQ, QI:
- Uses measurable, time-bound aims to guide improvement efforts
- Translates rapid learning into coordinated action
- Enables sustained, system-level change rather than isolated fixes
Using the Science of Improvement, teams move beyond maintaining performance to achieving new levels of quality, safety, and outcomes.
How Whole System Quality Works
IHI’s approach to embedding Whole System Quality within your organization focuses on enabling teams to shift from reacting to harm to preventing it in real time.
Understand the System
Assess current performance, identify variation, and uncover risks and opportunities.
Align and Design for Impact
Connect improvement efforts to strategy and co-develop actionable priorities with leaders and frontline teams.
Test, Learn, and Scale
Apply proven methods, tools, and coaching to test changes, use data to guide decisions, and spread what works.
What is required from leadership to advance quality across the system?
Grounded in leadership and management practices, WSQ helps organizations to align efforts and objectives, reduce unwanted variation, and deliver better results for patients, the workforce, and the communities they serve.
Whole System Quality helps leaders establish a shared aim, build the systems and structures needed to advance that aim. Achieving this requires a proactive, system-based approach to quality that includes:
Defining What Quality Means for patients, populations, communities, and the healthcare workforce and establishing a clear, shared aim
Building the Structures, Systems, and Processes that enable the workforce to achieve that aimConnect improvement efforts to strategy and co-develop actionable priorities with leaders and frontline teams.
Fostering a Culture of Learning through leadership practices that support problem identification, testing of changes, and the application of what is learned
Recursos adicionales
Preguntas frecuentes
¿Listo para explorar la calidad de todo el sistema?
IHI puede ayudar a su organización a mantener la mejora continua mediante un enfoque de calidad integral del sistema.
Ponte en contacto con nuestro equipo de consultoría.