Background: The Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM)’s Quality Improvement (QI) Special Interest Group’s (QI SIG) mission is “to create and maintain a community that promotes QI by connecting QI enthusiasts to each other and the resources necessary to develop and hone QI skills.” During this year, without in-person local or national meetings as opportunities to network or build communities, the task of connecting QI enthusiasts to each other is even more daunting. The QI Initiative subcommittee of the QI SIG, with members ranging from new QI enthusiasts to seasoned QI experts, chose to use their own expertise to run the subcommittee as a QI project using small tests of change to promote community engagement.

Purpose: The purpose was to implement QI methodologies to further subgroup goals during an exceptional year.

Description: Using a Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) framework, the QI SIG Initiative subgroup identified three project aims with corresponding measures: Aim 1: Create a supportive and growing community of QI people Measures: number of members on monthly calls; number of active participants on calls; number of HMX posts, responses, followed comments, and views Aim 2: Foster individual growth through skills and community/network building in QI Measure: number of members sharing their work with the group Aim 3: Design an educational project to directly address the needs identified in a prior assessment Measure: at least one QI educational initiative for the broader SHM community In response to these aims, we developed “a medical moment” to start each subgroup meeting in which a member shares QI interests and ideas regardless of experience beginning August 2020. We post this series on HMX to reach out to other QI enthusiasts across the SHM community and engage others with similar interests. In addition to supporting community and individual growth, the medical moment also allows members to teach and learn QI basics, which starts to address the third, educational, aim. Building on the success of the Medical Moment, we added a new “QI Happy Hour” with far-ranging QI topics based on HMX posts starting in September 2020. We believe this cycle will continue to feed engagement in the QI SIG; it has already brought in new QI SIG members (Figure 1).

Conclusions: As of November, 2020, twelve people have joined our subgroup calls with >90% participation on monthly calls. Each of the four subcommittee zoom meeting began with a member’s Medical Moment presentation all of which have been shared on HMX. HMX posts have increased, but HMX views have gone from almost zero monthly to a peak of 97 and have been greater than 30 for four months in a row (Figure 2). The QI SIG members now number greater than 1000! Applying QI methodologies to our subcommittee has allowed us to accomplish our goals including growing the community and creating a more connected community of QI enthusiasts during this trying time.

IMAGE 1: Figure 1: Conceptual Model of creating Engagement, Participation, and Community in the QI Special Interest Group through high interest work in Subgroup meetings.

IMAGE 2: Figure 2: HMX Engagement by month measured as HMX Posts, Comments, and Views. Two 2020 interventions are shown: Medical Moments from August 2020 and QI Happy Hour starting September 2020.