WIHI - A Podcast from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement

What might be possible if health care organizations across the US made a commitment to work to achieve health equity in their communities in dramatically new ways?

For nearly two years, the unprecedented collaboration of change agents across sectors convened by IHI has been changing the world in meaningful ways. Hundreds of communities around the world are working with kids, veterans, and elders on move-the-needle priorities like nutrition, mental health, and equity — the price of admission to 100 Million Healthier Lives.

You have a great idea for an improvement project to reduce infection rates at your organization. You and your team have created a meaningful aim, crafted a useful set of measures, and brainstormed several creative change ideas to test in the coming months. There’s support from leadership, energy from staff, and excitement around every corner. Now you need to successfully manage the project.

Addiction is always a complex challenge, but when a woman using substances is pregnant, suddenly two lives are at stake.

Medical errors may cause over 250,000 deaths a year in the United States. What if they didn't?

What can make the difference between having the tools and the support to manage new realities vs. being overwhelmed and drained? Plenty.

What can make the difference between having the tools and the support to manage new realities vs. being overwhelmed and drained? Plenty.

The US is in the midst of a serious opioid addiction epidemic. Driven largely by an explosion of prescribed pain medications, the dramatic rise in addiction and deaths from overdoses now has the attention of just about every sector of society that can play a role in addressing the problem.

Rules are made to broken, even in health care. Learn what leading health care organizations and IHI are doing to break the rules of health care and put patients and providers back at the center of care.

We say patients and clinicians should be co-producing health and health care, but co-production requires a true paradigm shift. For medical staff, letting go of seeing themselves as the sole engines and creators of the product known as health care. What if health care isn’t a product at all, but a service which both sides engage in and have an opportunity to shape.

What contributes to patient harm? It depends, of course, on the setting. Safety is important in every clinical setting. Find out how some experts are applying new frameworks and ways of thinking to improving safety in ambulatory settings.

If you’re going to measure, as we know health care improvers must do, you’re going to generate data. But in a world where there increasingly seems no end to what can be tracked and quantified and analyzed, there’s a real danger of creating a lot more data than you truly need..

What is the true north for the health care quality improvement movement? What are the questions leaders and champions of quality and safety initiatives must periodically ask themselves as a natural part of the process of seeking dramatic change? For Don Berwick, the questions, and the answers, are often moral ones.

If you work in primary care today, odds are good that you’re seeing patients with multiple chronic conditions. Even if a provider and patient work together to choose the right medications and agree on making some lifestyle changes that will improve health, the best-laid plans often fall apart.

A few years ago, IHI and others began suggesting to providers that instead of routinely asking patients “Whats the matter with you?” they should begin asking “What matters to you?”