IHI Open School

Each year, the Chancellor’s Scholarship was awarded to a QISP student at the culminating symposium. The scholarship provides students the opportunity to travel and present their QISP project at the National Forum on Quality Improvement in Healthcare. Nicole Dalal (MS2, SOM) was the 2016-2017 Chancellor’s Scholarship winner and presented her work at the 2017 IHI National Conference in Orlando. Well done Nicole! Here are some highlights from her experience.

A dry erase board at the conference allowing for attendees to collaborate and share ideas about caring for patients as they age.

View from one of the keynote addresses at the conference.

Nicole with Tiffany Christensen — author of Sick Girl Speaks!, a life-long patient CF/Transplant,  and a professional patient advocate — who delivered one of the Keynote addresses. She was an inspiration to hear speak and really informative with her insight about how to work collaboratively with patients.

Me (Nicole Dalal, MS2) with her poster featuring her work from the QISP program

The Quality & Innovation Scholars Program (QISP) is a unique six month long interdisciplinary, team-based practicum opportunity in healthcare quality improvement. The QISP scholars will complete didactic training in quality improvement and are matched with a faculty mentor to participate in an ongoing quality improvement project.

Duke IHI was pleased to host Dr. Mather, MD MBA, as part of our ongoing speaker series. Dr. Mather is the vice chairman of practice innovation in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Duke University School of Medicine and a faculty member at the Duke Clinical Research Institute. Dr. Mather discussed the Practice Innovation Unit at Duke Orthopaedics and one of their undergoing projects – the Joint Health Program. This project aims to provide a comprehensive care plan for osteoarthritis care. Currently, care is skewed towards surgical management, however for many patients, this is unnecessary. The Joint Health Program establishes a primary osteoarthritis provider that can coordinate and tailor the chronic care involving physical therapy, social work, and treatment regimen to patient needs. This helps ensure better selection of patients requiring surgery and gives patients a very individualized plan for their osteoarthritis. Initial results have shown very positive patient feedback.  

Many thanks to Dr. Mather for speaking!