Driving Quality Improvement Efforts
SIDM-IHI Initiative Developed New Tools and Techniques to Improve Diagnosis
Working with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine (SIDM) and a number of healthcare organizations formed a QI Collaborative to develop and test tools and techniques to improve the safety of the diagnostic process. With funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, SIDM and IHI jointly sponsored this prototype collaborative project, engaging healthcare organizations to trial one or more interventions aimed at improving the diagnostic process and its outcomes.
The SIDM-IHI collaborative included six pilot sites:
- MedStar Health
- University of Michigan
- Nationwide Children’s Hospital
- Tufts Medical Center
- Northwell Health
- UCSF Medical Center
These six organizations tested real-world interventions to improve the diagnostic process in their institutions. They worked together to share problems, insights, and lessons to continually improve the quality improvement (QI) projects they had underway.
Reducing Error in Clinical Practice
The National Academy of Medicine’s (NAM) landmark report, Improving Diagnosis in Health Care, identified diagnostic error as a major, unaddressed patient safety issue. The SIDM-IHI initiative directly addresses the goals laid out in the NAM report, as well as aligns with SIDM’s strategic priority to engage patients, clinicians, and healthcare systems to improve current diagnostic performance and reduce harm from diagnostic error.
The selected healthcare organizations applied to join the nine-month collaborative during which time they learned improvement skills and tested one or more interventions to reduce diagnostic error. Using the unique IHI Breakthrough Series Model that has successfully advanced safety and quality work over the past decade, the participating organizations worked and learned together.
A special thanks to the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for supporting the SIDM-IHI Initiative.
Pilot Sites
Learn more about the six SIDM-IHI Collaborative pilot sites who worked to improve the diagnostic process.