Curriculum

Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (QIPS)

The QIPS Fellowship is a non-ACGME accredited full-time junior faculty position designed to promote education and leadership in quality improvement and patient safety (QIPS). At the end of the one-year experience, the Fellow will have gained strong experiential and theoretical foundations in QIPS.

The position is includes both administrative and clinical time, with an emphasis on the former. Residents board-eligible or certified in any specialty who have completed training by June 30 are eligible to apply. The successful applicant will become a member of the Community Memorial Medical Staff.

This position runs from July 1 to June 30 and reports to both the specialty program director and the Vice President of Quality. Salary is commensurate with experience. The position offers full benefits with 20 days PTO and medical staff membership.

Goals & Objectives

Leadership development

• Become familiar with different aspects of administrative leadership through executive leadership rounds, finance rounds, and IT rounds

• Champion an Institutional QIPS issue through leadership of a longitudinal project

• Foster executive communication skills by reporting project progress and/or outcomes to Vice Presidents and the CMH Board

Administrative

• Gain familiarity with organizational and departmental structures, including executive walk rounds

• Become familiar with organizational systems, including Intelex, Axiom, Qnet, Medisolv, and Sentri7

• Understand the process of regulatory compliance

• Understand quality metrics, programs, and clinical outcomes/analysis

• Engage in patient safety education, institutional processes, reporting, and advocacy

• Participate in select QIPS-related institutional committee meetings

• Assist in preparing for the sponsoring institution CLER visit

Clinical

• Care for patients as assigned, doing inpatient hospitalist shifts and/or seeing patients in academic medicine clinic, depending on the Fellow’s preference

• Clinical work is included so that the Fellow continues to build clinical and teaching skills, however, the time allocated to clinical work should not interfere with Fellowship learning

Educational

• Gain working knowledge of the following:

  • Quality improvement tools, including Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles, process map, and fishbone diagrams
  • Current literature on quality improvement and patient safety
  • Statistical methodology and use of hospital databases
  • Community Memorial QIPS-related reporting, such as patient satisfaction and culture of safety data and STAR reporting
  • Utilization review practices

• Pursue advanced IHI training+

  • PS 201: Root Cause Analyses and Actions

  • PS 202: Achieving Total Systems Safety

  • PS 203: Pursuing Professional Accountability and a Just Culture

  • QI 201: Planning for Spread: From Local Improvements to System-Wide Change

  • QI 202: Addressing Small Problems to Build Safer, More Reliable Systems
    +Requires IHI Basic Certificate in Quality and Safety

• Attend regional or national conference on QIPS

Curriculum Development

• Provide orientation for interns to M&M (FM and IM), STAR reporting, I-PASS, and RCAs

• Coordinate specialty-based QIPS morning report teaching cases to address common quality concerns in health care delivery, including issues surrounding health equity

• Participate in the following conferences as time permits:

  • QIPS-focused morning report

  • M&M focused on resident presentations of system-based inpatient or outpatient QIPS issues

  • RCAs and other patient safety activities

• Leadership role in facilitating alignment of residents’ QIPS projects with institutional QIPS initiatives

Scholarship production

• Fellows should participate in a longitudinal project designed to lead to systematic improvements at Community Memorial and share outcomes through a scholarly paper, poster, or presentation