Background: Healthcare systems need formal processes for recognizing achievements in healthcare improvement to support promotion. To aid in the recognition of faculty members’ contributions to healthcare improvement, institutions have begun to use portfolios to document and highlight an individual’s achievements and successes. All healthcare professions contribute to healthcare improvement. Yet, existing healthcare improvement portfolios have been developed to reflect the needs of individual types of professions and thus, may not be applicable to all healthcare professionals.
Purpose: We sought to create a healthcare improvement portfolio to demonstrate excellence in quality improvement, patient safety, and innovation among interprofessional faculty for promotion or tenure. We validated the healthcare improvement portfolio through a modified Delphi Consensus Panel with an interprofessional group of experts across North America.
Description: We reviewed the literature and existing quality improvement and educational portfolios from health professions universities to create a draft portfolio. The draft was revised based on feedback from faculty at our institution and faculty from a national healthcare improvement fellowship program. We used a two-round modified Delphi consensus panel to refine the portfolio. The first round included experts (n=35) in healthcare improvement from medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and clinical psychology who gave feedback through open-ended comments on the design and content of each section of the portfolio (personal statement; healthcare improvement training and certification; leadership and administrative roles; healthcare improvement project activities; healthcare improvement training, education and curricular activities; healthcare improvement honors, awards and recognitions) as well as the overall portfolio. The portfolio was revised based on the feedback. A second draft was sent to the same experts who were asked to rate the comprehensiveness and clarity of each portion of the portfolio and the entire portfolio on a Likert scale of 1-9 (where a score of 9 indicated higher comprehensiveness and clarity) and provide comments. Consensus was defined as an average score over 8.0. Participants in the second round of the panel (n=34) achieved consensus with average scores of 8.4 in comprehensiveness and 8.3 in clarity with scores ranging from 6-9. Comments indicated support for the portfolio. The healthcare improvement portfolio has been used by faculty at our institution to document their efforts in healthcare improvement for academic promotion.
Conclusions: Experts in healthcare improvement reached consensus on a conceptually-robust, content-rich healthcare improvement portfolio to be used by interprofessional faculty for promotion and tenure. Our next steps are to develop objective criteria for each section of the portfolio to recognize excellence in healthcare improvement for faculty awards.