Together for healthcare improvement - Insights from the IHI Forum

In alignment with Executive Insight's continued efforts to be a partner in healthcare improvement, last week the team participated in the Institute for Healthcare Improvement IHI & BMJ International Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare.

Under the common ethos of “Together to Regenerate Healthcare”, the team was inspired by best practices in QI from around the world. Recognising there are still opportunities to further innovate and mounting societal challenges to overcome, we took away five success factors to elevate the impact of cross-stakeholder QI efforts:

Promote leadership under a common purpose

• Enable leadership at different levels of the organisation, working within a flat hierarchy
• Ensure common purpose, that fits within broader strategic imperatives (e.g. sustainability)
• Create a safe culture of failure for success

Co-create and co-produce with the community

• From the start and throughout, involve the community including patients and caregivers
• Identify inequalities by hearing everyone’s voices (go where the people are)
• Embrace the role of the healthcare system as an “anchor institution” to impact broader social determinants of health

Embrace digital innovation and new ideas

• Leverage the potential of AI as an assistant, not as a replacement to primary responsibilities, to ensure clinical knowledge and skills sustain
• Promote digital inclusion vs. exclusion to ensure equitable impact
• Learn from other industries that do improvement well

Start with scale up in mind and avoid working in microsystems

• Define a plan but be open to flex for local needs
• Embed continuous, systematic evaluation and develop learning systems
• Promote best practice sharing to support cross-pollination of challenges and successes

Institutionalize QI for sustainability

• Dedicate resources to build the infrastructure, develop QI capabilities and learning systems
• Streamline implementation and minimise disruption to the system to promote adoption
• Communicate in the right way, in terms of timing (communicating impact along the way, to the right stakeholders) and message (digestible, data-driven impactful outcomes)

We are looking forward to sharing our learnings in upcoming Healthcare Improvement Trailblazer (HIT) Community Forums, and more broadly supporting our clients to elevate their healthcare improvement capabilities.