Health Care Quality ImprovementFrom Design to Implementation

Overview

Health care leaders and professionals want to undertake improvement projects in their practice or organization, and many don’t know where to begin, or how to analyze and properly gauge their successes. Health Care Quality Improvement: From Design to Implementation will use a real case study to take participants through the journey of identifying, planning, measuring, and creating process changes that will lead to results.

This program will show you how to design and implement your own health care improvement project from a practitioner with extensive international experience. This course uses a simulation exercise, with frameworks and methods taught just-in-time for you to apply in small groups during each session. This eight-session program will teach you how to:

• Develop your aim for improvement
• Identify the improvement team
• Flowchart the process of care delivery
• Establish your improvement indicators
• Determine how to test
• Monitor changes in your process
• Graph the results
• Finalize your implementation-ready design

Participants will work in small groups through each of the steps in the simulation exercise, receiving faculty feedback each step of the way. The practical application of how to design, develop and implement a health care improvement project is pivotal to the outcomes of the learning in this course.

No prior knowledge or experience with health care improvement is required for this practical course.

Objectives & Highlights

Learning Objectives

• Articulate the key issue in health care quality
• Explain the fundamentals underlying the science of improvement
• Define improvement aims
• Form improvement teams
• Analyze processes of care
• Develop improvement indicators
• Plot time series charts
• Test and implement changes to improve health care processes
• Monitor and evaluate results of tested changes and make decisions based on them
• Conduct iterative testing of changes to achieve the desired result

Course Highlights

• A simulation exercise around a NACS (Nutrition Assessment Counseling and Service) case study example. The simulation exercise starts from developing the aim statement and goes through the step sequence of setting up the improvement team, flowcharting the process of care delivery, developing the improvement indicators, testing and monitoring changes in the process of care delivery, graphing the results of the tests on a time-series chart, and acting based on the results of the tests to iteratively make continuous improvements. 
• Design of each participant’s own health care improvement project. Each participant chooses the health care priority they would like to improve. They will receive guidance on setting the aim for the improvement, how they will measure that they have achieved the improvement and lay out their plan for how they will conduct it. 
• Implementation of health care improvement: Improvement projects, to be conducted by each participant over the next few months. These include data collection, analysis of processes, plotting of annotated time series charts, showing changes that have worked, and changes that have not.

Credits and Logistics

Continuing Education Credit

The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health designates this live activity for a maximum of 10 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health will grant 1 Continuing Education Units (CEUs) for this program, equivalent to 10 contact hours of education. Participants can apply these contact hours toward other professional education accrediting organizations.

All credits subject to final agenda.

Faculty

Current faculty, subject to change.

M. Rashad Massoud, MD, MPH, FACP

Program Director

June 3 – 13, 2024

Visiting Lecturer
Department of Global Health and Population and Francois--Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Agenda

Who Should Participate

• Mid-level Health care leaders who want a practical approach and means to contextualize their learnings for current or future health care improvement projects 
• Senior Leaders who have had previous training in health care improvement and want more practical application in their learning for a current or future projects 
• Various health care personnel with titles that may include Health Care Project Managers, Director of Quality Improvement, Director of Patient Experience, Director of Hospital Operations, Director of Patient Safety, Physician and Nurse Leaders, Director of Engagement, Service Line Leaders, Executive Directors, Ministry of Health Team Leaders, Directors of Programs and more