IHI Executive Quality Academy

Don't miss the upcoming Executive Quality Academy. It's an Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) training program on leadership:

Executive Quality Academy • April 8–10, 2013, in Cambridge, MA

Health care CEOs could once argue that their role was to get the finances, facilities, and capital investments right, and that it was the job of the doctors and nurses to deliver quality care. Not anymore. Leaders are responsible for all patient outcomes and are under pressure to produce both high quality and high value. The principal output of IHI’s intensive three-day Executive Quality Academy will be a detailed plan for each organization to achieve one or more "how good, by when" system-level quality aims, integrated into the strategic plan of that organization – to fix the biggest issues. Learn more at ihi.org/eqa.

Why Attend the IHI Executive Quality Academy?
Health care CEOs once could argue that their role was to get the finances, facilities, and capital investments right, and that it was the job of the doctors and nurses to deliver quality care. Not anymore. Leaders are responsible for all patient outcomes and are under pressure to produce both high quality and high value. While it's important to improve quality in one condition, or reduce costs in one department, the new health care environment demands system-level improvement across multiple dimensions of quality, patient outcomes, and organizational performance. This pressure, when combined with early versions of "pay-for-performance" initiatives such as Bridges to Excellence and the Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration Project, led by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services/Premier, Inc., has made clinical quality performance a strategic imperative — and no longer just a regulatory requirement, or the "right thing to do." In other words, clinical quality performance is no longer delegable to "the quality people."

Responsibility for measured performance in clinical quality and safety rests squarely on the shoulders of each member of the senior executive team, regardless of whether or not they have a clinical background.

Executive level leadership that is both strategic and transformative is required.
So the question is not whether CEOs and other senior executives must take responsibility for measured system-level quality performance. The question is how to do this new job while still doing all the components of the old job. That is the core question that the Executive Quality Academy answers.