BU Team Pilots Hands-on Approach to Teaching Hospital Quality Improvement.
A hands-on approach to teaching medical residents about quality improvement (QI) initiatives can foster positive attitudes about improving health care delivery and expose students to a collaborative team structure that duplicates future working relationships, according to researchers from the BU medical campus and one researcher now at Mount Auburn Hospital.
In a paper published online in the American Journal of Medical Quality, the study team discussed a novel approach to teaching medical residents about quality improvements, in addition to their clinical training. In recent years, the federal government has emphasized the need for hospitals to focus on QI, improving underlying work processes and systems to enhance patient care and safety, and to reduce unnecessary spending.
The curriculum initiative was piloted at Boston Medical Center, where 90 internal medicine residents and eight BU School of Public Health students participated in a series of four 60- to 90-minute interactive and hands-on QI sessions. The students got an overview of quality improvement from BMC’s chief medical officer and the director for quality and patient safety.
Working with faculty, the group learned about “process mapping” and the principles of “value-added” and “non-value-added” activities, and then created 17 QI project plans over a four-month period. The projects, geared to BMC, included: improving flu vaccination delivery; improving efficiency in obtaining medical records prior to new patient visits; and improving care for patients with language barriers.
“This QI curriculum can be an educational model of how health care trainees can work collaboratively to improve health care quality,” the study team said. The medical residents reported that they “felt that support was provided for their QI training and for projects that were aligned with institutional goals. The curriculum structure is a novel way to provide QI education to future practitioners during their residency training. [It] also addressed the professionalism and interpersonal and communication skills competencies.”
The team added: “The time to reduce waste and inefficiency and to improve patient safety by working in inter-professional teams in our health care system is past due. The authors hope this model can be further refined to engage future providers, early in their training, in an approach to QI that will help create a collaborative workforce that is knowledgeable and skillful at improving the health care system and care provided to patients.”
Authors of the paper included: Dr. Charlene Weigel of Mount Auburn Hospital and Harvard Medical School; Dr. Winnie Suen of Boston Medical Center; and Gouri Gupte, PhD, assistant professor of health policy and management at the BU School of Public Health.
Submitted by: Lisa Chedekel
chedekel@bu.edu