WIHI - A Podcast from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement

If you work in primary care today, odds are good that you’re seeing patients with multiple chronic conditions. Even if a provider and patient work together to choose the right medications and agree on making some lifestyle changes that will improve health, the best-laid plans often fall apart.

A few years ago, IHI and others began suggesting to providers that instead of routinely asking patients “Whats the matter with you?” they should begin asking “What matters to you?”

We might spend our entire working lives striving to become better colleagues and leaders and more effective team members; Neil Baker works with health care organizations to enhance leadership and team impac

One in twenty adults suffers a diagnostic error every year. How do we take such a formidable analysis and “wake-up call” about patient safety and turn it into opportunity?

Caught up in a political maelstrom several years ago, CMS has now caught up with a growing desire of patients and loved ones to express, and have health care respect, their wishes at the end of life.

One of the hallmarks of the health care improvement movement has been the way in which diverse organizations and teams come together to gain the knowledge, skills, and confidence needed to implement change. The most celebrated of these models over the past few decades has been the collaborative – as simple a concept as it is radical.

Health and health care improvement communities in the US are focusing on equity and racial disparities in some important new ways. The new learning is coming from the “doing,” often making use of existing data that already tell a powerful story of persistent inequities and highlight where there are opportunities to intervene.

What are the particular skills and training needed to be an effective community health worker? How can CHWs gain greater professional recognition?

There's growing awareness of the need to curb health cares overuse of interventions that lack a strong evidence base, unnecessarily subject patients to potential harm, and are more expensive than equally effective, cheaper alternatives.

When you imagine the legions of quality improvers around the globe working hard to transform health and health care, does your picture include students?