Elevating Quality and Safety: Our Innovative Curriculum

In the last two decades, the significance of quality improvement (QI) and patient safety has surged. Beyond residency, they drive problem-solving, practice management, compensation, and public reporting. Recognizing its importance, ACGME has integrated QI/PS as a pivotal skill set, integral throughout your training.

Our QI/PS Curriculum is dynamic and immersive. It spotlights shared aspirations of stakeholders within Temple University Health System: GME fostering QI/PS learning, cost-effectiveness aligned with hospital administration, patient safety, and faculty career progression.

Goals and Objectives:

• Foster culture change at Temple University Hospital to make quality improvement and patient safety an integral part of everyday patient care
• Increase scholarly productivity on quality improvement and patient safety topics, with projects presented at local, regional, or national meetings, and/or submitted for publication.
• Prepare residents for autonomous practice and career success vis-a-vis quality reporting and contracting.

Framework

QI and Its Integration Through Group-Think

• Pain-a-thon: Residents of all years come up with pain points (things they struggle with when delivering daily patient care) in hospital aligned domains
• Hack-a-thon: Rising PGY2s pick a pain point and begin to imagine their QI project
• Shark tank: Early PGY2s pitch their projects to health systems leaders and create buy-in from a system level
• Fish Bowl: End of year presentations on projects and results
   

Scholarship:

• All projects are submitted to local and national conferences and yield scholarship for job/fellowship applications
• Some recent examples include abstracts and presentations at our in-house research symposium Sol Sherry, Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM), American College of Physicians (ACP), High Value Practice Alliance (HVPA), American College of Cardiology (ACC), and many more!

Patient Safety Curriculum:

• Goal: Empower residents with a robust patient safety curriculum, emphasizing the mastery of error recognition, prevention, and transparent communication within healthcare teams, thereby cultivating a culture of vigilant patient safety advocates who prioritize continuous improvement and minimize preventable harm.
• Content is embedded into the IHI Modules structures
• Hospital level experts discuss linkage of content and its applicability to daily patient care, and hospital level metrics and initiatives
• Case discussion through resident led conferences in conducting Root Cause Analysis (RCA’s), Mortality and Morbidity conferences, and patient safety event reporting reviews

QI/PS Curriculum Leadership:

• Dharmini Shah Pandya, MD (Director of QI/PS curriculum)
• Rishabh Khatri, MD (Chief Resident for Health Systems Sciences)
• Jamie L. Garfield, MD; Andrew Wickerham MD (Curriculum founders)