A lthough methods for continuous quality improvement have been used to improve outcomes, 1-3 some, such as the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development Quality Collaborative, 4 have reported little or no effect in neonatal intensive care units (ICUs). These methods have been criticized for being based on intuition and anecdotes rather than on evidence.5 To address these concerns, researchers have developed methods aimed at improving the use of evidence in quality improvement. Tarnow-Mordi and colleagues, 6 Sankaran and colleagues 7 and others [8][9][10] have used benchmarking instruments 6,8,11 to show risk-adjusted variations in outcomes in neonatal ICUs. Synnes and colleagues 12 reported that variations in the rates of intraventricular hemorrhage could be attributed to practice differences. MacNab and colleagues 13 showed how multi level modelling methods can be used to identify practice differences associated with variations in outcomes for targeted interventions and to quantify their attributable risks.Building on these results, we developed the Evidence-based Practice for Improving Quality method for continuous quality improvement. This method is based on 3 pillars: the use of evidence from published literature; the use of data from participating hospitals to identify hospital-specific practices for targeted intervention; and the use of a national network to share expertise. By selectively targeting hospital-specific practices for intervention, this method reduces the reliance on intuition and anecdotes that are associated with existing quality-improvement methods.Our objective was to evaluate the efficacy of the Evidencebased Practice for Improving Quality method by conducting a prospective cluster randomized controlled trial to reduce nosocomial infection and bronchopulmonary dysplasia among infants born at 32 or fewer weeks' gestation and admitted to 12 Canadian Neonatal Network hospitals 14 over a 36-month period. We hypothesized that the incidence of nosocomial infection would be reduced among infants in ICUs randomized to reduce infection but not among those in ICUs randomized to reduce bronchopulmonary dysplasia. We also hypothesized that the incidence of bronchopulmonary dysplasia would be reduced among infants in the ICUs randomized to reduce this outcome but not among those in ICUs randomized to reduce infections. Background: We developed and tested a new method, called the Evidence-based Practice for Improving Quality method, for continuous quality improvement.

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