The Role for Clinician Educators in Implementing Healthcare Improvement

Abstract

Clinician educators-who work at the intersection of patient care and resident education-are well positioned to respond to calls for better, safer patient care and resident education. Explicit lessons that address implementing health care improvement and associated residency training came out of the Academic Chronic Care Collaboratives and include the importance of: (1) redesigning the clinical practice as a core component of the residency curriculum; (2) exploiting the efficiencies of the practice team; (3) replacing "faculty development" with "everyone's a learner;" (4) linking faculty across learning communities to build expertise; and (5) using rigorous methodology to design and evaluate interventions for practice redesign. There has been progress in addressing three thorny academic faculty issues-professional satisfaction, promotion and publication. For example, consensus criteria have been proposed for both faculty promotion as well as the institutional settings that nurture academic health care improvement careers, and the SQUIRE Publication Guidelines have been developed as a general framework for scholarly improvement publications. Extensive curricular resources exist for developing the expert faculty cadre. Curricula from representative training programs include quantitative and qualitative research methods, statistical methodologies appropriate for measuring systems change, organizational culture, management, leadership and scholarly writing for the improvement literature. Clinician educators-particularly those in general internal medicine-bear the principal responsibility for both patient care and resident training in academic departments of internal medicine. The intersection of these activities presents a unique opportunity for their playing a central role in implementing health care improvement and associated residency training. However, this role in academic settings will require an unambiguous development strategy both for faculty and their institutions.

Future Rehabilitation Professionals' Intentions to Use Self-Management Support: Helping Students to Help Patients

“…[7][8][9][14][15][16] In pursuit of this objective, several academic medical centres across the United States adopted a national initiative aimed at incorporating CCM programmes; this initiative has shown promising results and inspired further initiatives. [7][8][9]17 On a smaller scale, incorporating SMS into educational curricula has been successful in improving students' knowledge of SMS.…”

Documenting Quality Improvement and Patient Safety Efforts: The Quality Portfolio. A Statement from the Academic Hospitalist Taskforce

“…As these physicians apply for promotion or advancement, they need a mechanism for documenting their efforts and achievements. 2 The quality portfolio fills a present void in the existing system of specifically documenting excellence in quality improvement and patient safety. It offers a standard way to document the breadth and depth of the work of those engaged in improvement efforts.…”

“…Continuous improvement of quality and safety in healthcare is a national priority, and exemplary calls for action are available. [1][2][3][4][5][6] In light of mounting pressures to improve care delivery and given the classic tripartite missions of research, education, and clinical care, academic medical centers face significant challenges in developing effective quality improvement and patient safety leaders and programs. At academic medical centers, an increasing number of physicians investigate, teach, and work to improve the quality of care and the safety of care delivery.…”

Academic General Internal Medicine: A Mission for the Future

“…Innovation in this area may build upon the ongoing shifts from inpatient to ambulatory settings for internal medicine training, encourage the development of skills related to population management and value based care, and even examine new ways in which medical trainees can contribute to the success of these new organizational and payment approaches. 54 Furthermore, academic GIM has a particular responsibility to ensure that these changes in health care delivery are translated into increased interest in GIM and primary care medicine among trainees.…”