The Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine (SIDM) https://www.improvediagnosis.org and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI www.ihi.org with funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation https://www.moore.org, are jointly sponsoring a collaborative project that will include six selected healthcare organizations. The purpose for the project is to work with one or more interventions aimed at improving the diagnostic process and outcomes.
The SIDM/IHI initiative will address one of the major goals from the National Academy of Medicine’s https://nam.edu report titled “Improving Diagnosis in Health Care” which describes how identifying diagnostic errors is a major unaddressed patient safety issue.
The selected healthcare organizations must provide either inpatient or ambulatory services or both. Each organization will each be asked to join a six month collaborative during which time, they will learn improvement skills and test one or more interventions to reduce diagnostic errors. Using the IHI Collaborative approach, the organizations will work and learn together by sharing problems, insights, and lessons learned.
SIDM and IHI will jointly conduct a literature review and environmental scan to identify interventions already in use or proposed to improve diagnosis. A driver diagram will be constructed that will identify the types of interventions that are most promising.
Organizations participating will be supported by an expert advisory panel, learn about diagnostic safety, be able to improve training and coaching, and have the opportunity to learn and work with other organizations selected for the collaborative.
The organizations are expected to identify an improvement team, attend a meeting in Cambridge Massachusetts in October, attend three learning session in 2018, attend bi-monthly telementoring sessions, establish teams to share results and measure their improvement, and submit a final report.
Organizations participating will receive $15,000 to help offset costs related to project management and oversight. Applications need to be submitted electronically in PDF format by email to info@improvediagnosis.org by September 8th 2017.