Despite the remarkable progress in improving healthcare, avoidable harm and wide variations in the quality of care remain a reality. There is a critical need to build capability and capacity in the work force on the science of quality improvement (QI) and safety, assure that there are rigorous ways to evaluate QI interventions, and quickly disseminate the results of these efforts. Strong partnerships between interprofessional researchers, educators, and frontline providers are critical. Until this need is met, the pace with which improvement science impacts health outcomes and care delivery will continue to be unacceptably slow. We propose that the Academy for Healthcare Improvement (AHI) sponsor a third annual conference, entitled Advancing the Methods of Evaluation of Quality and Safety Practice and Education. To begin to develop an interprofessional workforce with the skills to apply and rigorously evaluate the context-sensitive effectiveness of improvement science-based interventions, AHI will partner with the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses Institute. The conference specific aims are to provide QI-focused clinicians, researchers and educators from a variety of disciplines with information and experience that will enable them to improve quality and safety by: 1) conveying evidence-based methods of building effective capability in improvement science across professional communities toward the goal of creating and facilitating interprofessional communities in local and national healthcare settings, 2) providing skills to apply rigorous evaluation designs to QI interventions in order to delineate not only effectiveness, but also the theory and mechanisms involved, and 3) demystifying the scientific writing process to enhance the publication and dissemination of effective improvement efforts. Achieving these aims will result in 1) an interprofessional healthcare workforce with the capacity and capability to apply QI science in their daily work (whether practice, research or education-focused), and 2) QI-focused clinicians, researchers and educators who routinely apply robust evaluation methods to their work, resulting in successful replication of effective interventions in healthcare and a concomitant acceleration of improved patient outcomes. Conference activities will include keynote lectures, workshops, panel discussions, abstract presentations and writing workshops. Speakers will include recognized experts whose sessions will focus on methods applicable to real-world settings using examples of AHRQ priority populations. Conference proceedings will be disseminated via web links and Twitter feeds.
Through keynote lectures, workshops, panel discussions, abstract presentations and writing workshops, the proposed Advancing the Methods of Evaluation of Quality and Safety Practice and Education conference will support inter-professional clinicians, educators and researchers at the frontline of improving healthcare to implement proven methods of both teaching QI and evaluating the impact of QI in the US healthcare system. Conference proceedings will be disseminated nationally and internationally via web links and Twitter feeds before, during and after the conference.
