Quality and Safety in Clinical Operations: Advancements for Improving Health Outcomes

Course Overview

Quality and Safety in Clinical Operations: Advancements for Improving Health Outcomes is a three-day educational opportunity designed for leaders who want to improve the performance of their health care institutions. This online, live-virtual course will review ways to achieve excellent clinical outcomes while reducing preventable harm. We start with the premise that much has improved in the twenty years since Err is Human was published.

The framework of the six pillars of quality has served us well as guideposts, however, progress in all six domains is not consistent and outcomes are not uniformly excellent. Institutions vary in their performance; underserved populations fare worse than their counterparts and patients and health care workers still experience preventable harm.

Despite evidence to support the use of basic safety practices, we see a failure to implement these practices reliably across the continuum of care. Moreover, we see that gaps in care need to be addressed through collaborations between health care providers and community leaders to engineer solutions to help underserved populations. Sustaining our gains, addressing implementation failures for known solutions, identifying new solutions where needed, and while designing new solutions to address glaring gaps in care for the underserved are the challenges we face.

The Quality and Safety in Clinical Operations course will present these challenges with practical solutions. Participants will learn to identify issues and design applied solutions to accelerate improvement today and with future goals in mind.

Who Should Attend

Physicians, nurses, administrative leaders, policy makers, researchers and health care professionals working in quality and safety, health care informatics and clinical operations are encouraged to attend. This course is designed for the following health care providers:

• Allied health care professionals
• Hospitalists
• Nurse practitioners
• Physicians
• Physician Assistants
• Physician Associates
• Registered nurses

Learning Objectives

The course presents the challenges of today, including COVID-19, with practical solutions to accelerate the advancement of quality and safety. Upon completion of the activity, you will be able to:

• Describe the challenges related to patient safety and quality improvement
• Design practical solutions with the premise that this is a work in progress and that we all can improve
• Reflect on industry leaders' perspectives around current states and the goals for the future
• Articulate how focused attention on a common goal can accelerate improvement

Questions?

Please contact the Continuing Education Programs with any questions by email at ceprograms@hms.harvard.edu or phone at (617) 384-8600.