HISC - Healthcare Improvement Skills Center

The 2001 Institute of Medicine report, Crossing the Quality Chasm, describes a gap between evidence-based best practice and what we are able to achieve on a daily basis for our patients. Clinicians who complete the following learning modules will be able to address this gap in their own practices. They will be better able to:

Analyze current care,
Generate hypotheses about the link between action and results,
Develop ideas about how to improve,
Design a test of a change in practice, and
Plan to disseminate and sustain successful results.

Before beginning the program modules, we encourage you to review the following information:

For more information on the need for these modules and how they were developed, please see the About HISC section of this website.

Helps you to describe in general terms what it is that is causing some concern or seems to be presenting an unusual opportunity.

Looks at some factors to consider when selecting who to involve in an improvement effort and a few ways of helping such groups to work more effectively.

Helps you identify and carefully describe what it is you really want to improve; that is, the source of the problem you are confronting, etc.

Shows you how to use basic quality improvement tools and skills to identify sources of unwanted variation in a process and how to introduce and evaluate interventions.

Introduces you to the selection, display, and analysis of data measures to determine when a process change over time is likely to be due to chance and when it is not.

Demonstrates how to reconsider, sustain, and/or extend process improvements.