Background: The Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM)’s Quality Improvement Special Interest Group’s (QI SIG) mission is “to create and maintain a community that promotes quality improvement by connecting quality improvement enthusiasts to each other and the resources necessary to develop and hone quality improvement skills.” The QI Initiative subgroup of QI SIG was charged with improving support for QI enthusiasts within SHM, especially those with advanced QI experience and skills. As leaders in QI methodologies, the subgroup applied its expertise to use by turning its mission and initiative into a Quality Improvement (QI) project itself.
Purpose: The purpose of this QI project was to identify opportunities for enhanced support available from SHM and SHM QI SIG for QI enthusiasts with previous experience and skills.
Description: The QI SIG Initiatives subgroup was launched in May 2019 and used the QI SIG A3 template, from the HMX (Hospital Medicine Exchange online platform) SIG Library on (Figure 1), as the primary project guidance tool. This allowed the information to be easily shared amongst subgroup members and the QI SIG community at-large and on HMX. The subgroup’s initial efforts were to better understand the background and current state of QI support efforts within SHM, i.e. describe the problem. This was accomplished by informal interviews with SHM Hospital Quality and Patient Safety (HQPS) committee members and SHM staff, as well as reviewing content in The Hospitalist, HM19, and the Journal of Hospital Medicine. Based on these data, we determined there was insufficient information about the QI enthusiasts’ true needs to launch a high yield intervention. Thus, the subgroup identified three project aims: 1) Identify QI related roles that hospitalists fill within their institution/healthcare system/at-large 2) Describe QI educational needs within a population of self-identified QI enthusiast hospitalists and 3) Design an educational project to directly address these needs. To accomplish the first two aims, we created and administered a survey for SHM QI enthusiasts via the HMX. As of November 26, 2019, 72 QI enthusiasts have answered the survey. Preliminary analysis of the survey demonstrated that nearly half of the respondents (35/72, 49%) were junior faculty Internists from large hospitals affiliated with large health systems and/or academic centers. For the needs assessment, respondents desired a number of resources including focus on QI methodologies, manuscript preparation, and peer-to-peer mentorship models. When asked about barriers to getting training that they need, time was a significant contributor for nearly two-thirds of respondents. After a more detailed analysis is completed, stratifying for different respondent types and needs, the information will be shared with both the HQPS committee and the SIG’s liaison to the SHM Board. With all the appropriate stakeholders updated, the intervention planning will begin.
Conclusions: Applying QI methodology improved our ability to coordinate and accomplish our project aims. SHM’s QI content experts were willing to participate in a needs assessment survey. Once our problem description and analysis are complete, the subgroup anticipates designing interventions to address respondents’ educational needs.
