Achieve Continuous Improvement by Design for Better Care Every Day
IHI CareOS Consulting Services help healthcare organizations embed continuous learning and continuous improvement into daily operations. By connecting clinical care, operations, technology, data, and improvement work, CareOS helps organizations improve safety, efficiency, and experience while building the capability to sustain improvement over time.
Today's Healthcare Challenges
Why Healthcare Organizations Need a New Operating Model
Healthcare organizations are managing increasing complexity. Quality initiatives, workforce challenges, operational pressures, digital transformation efforts, and patient expectations all demand attention at the same time.
When teams, workflows, technology, and decision-making remain disconnected, improvement can become fragmented and difficult to scale. To improve performance consistently, organizations need a way to integrate learning, improvement, and decision-making into how care is delivered every day.
What is IHI CareOS?
IHI CareOS is a consulting engagement that helps healthcare organizations build a sustainable operating model for continuous improvement. It brings quality, safety, operations, data, workforce experience, and improvement science into one connected framework for better performance.
Why Organizations Choose CareOS
Create Conditions for Safer, More Reliable Care
Strengthen learning systems, identify risks earlier, reduce preventable harm, and support more consistent care delivery across the organization.
Improve Coordinated Care Flow Across the System
Connect workflows, patient flow, operational priorities, and performance management to reduce inefficiencies and improve coordination.
Strengthen Organizational Capacity for Improvement
Move beyond isolated projects by creating the structures, governance, and learning systems needed to sustain improvement over time.
Maximize Existing Technology Investments
Connect existing EHRs, analytics platforms, and operational systems into a unified approach that supports improvement and decision-making.
Mayara de Oliveira S. dos Santos
Quality and Safety Practices Consultant Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein - Search
Quality and Safety Practices Consultant Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein - Search
"This project has had a meaningful impact on how we approach patient safety. With IHI’s support, we developed the ELO framework, connecting data, frontline teams, leadership, and learning into a single operational model. The project strengthened our daily safety routines, increased visibility of emerging risks, and improved our ability to identify and address safety concerns proactively. Most importantly, it helped build organizational capability and created a stronger culture of collaboration, learning, and continuous improvement."
How CareOS Works
For more than three decades, focused quality improvement efforts have helped healthcare organizations improve specific outcomes. Those methods remain essential. Today's challenge is ensuring those improvements can be sustained and spread across increasingly complex systems.
Download the CareOS Prospectus
THE CAREOS FRAMEWORK
Two Dimensions of Improvement Working Together
CareOS brings together two complementary dimensions of improvement.
Addresses specific outcomes, populations, and organizational needs, including patient safety, workforce well-being, maternal and infant health, healthy aging, and population health.
Builds the methods and infrastructure teams need to learn, adapt, and improve continuously, including improvement science, human factors, resilience engineering, root cause analysis, and management systems consulting.
IHI CareOS operates through three integrated strategies:
Enterprise Engagement
An engagement program that strengthens organizational learning, restores agency for frontline teams, and builds leadership capability at every level, helping create a culture of continuous improvement.
Cross-Disciplinary Improvement Structures
An improvement structure that unifies governance across quality, safety, operations, and analytics, ensuring risks identified at the front line reach leaders with authority to act.
Technology and Data Enablement
An integration strategy that designs data and technology for use at the point of decision, turning existing organizational information into practical insights clinicians can act on.
Additional Resources
Lead Better Systems of Care
Learn how leaders can remove barriers, align resources, and create the conditions for successful care operating systems.
Improve Systems, Not People
See why improving underlying systems, not individual performance, leads to safer and more reliable care.
Build a CareOS
Learn how to embed quality, safety, data, and frontline feedback into continuous system improvement.
FAQs
Ready to Explore CareOS?
Achieve resiliency and efficiency in daily operations. Connect clinical care, workflows, teams, data, and technology in a system designed to accelerate learning and improve what you do every day.
Contact Our Consulting Team