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Quality Update
The Director's Chair: Invitation to an Exciting Idea
By Richard "Chip" Davis, Ph.D., Executive Director
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| Richard "Chip" Davis, Ph.D., Executive Director, Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care. |
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Welcome to our first issue of Quality Update , a publication conceived to share the experiences of the Johns Hopkins Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care with health leaders in the United States and around the globe.
The health care industry is experiencing an unparalleled era of innovation and discovery. Sophisticated new technologies and medications appear on the scene almost daily. At the same time, hospitals face enormous challenges: Nurses, technicians and other health care workers often are in short supply, budgetary belt tightening has become standard business practice, and regulatory and documentation requirements grow more complex. With these rapid changes and the pressures they place on caregivers comes the increased likelihood of inefficiency, system failures and patient harm.
More people die each year from medical mistakes in the United States than from AIDS, breast cancer or motor vehicle accidents. To cure this epidemic, we must transform the rhetoric of patient safety into an everyday reality. The goals of better quality health care are broad and demanding, and involve more than incremental improvements to its processes. Providing ideal care for our patients requires fundamentally new approaches to quality and the creation of disruptive models of care.
The mission of the Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care mirrors that of Johns Hopkins Medicine: patient care, education and research. In fulfilling its mission, center staff work with multidisciplinary care teams to expedite the identification and quick transformation of improvement ideas into reality. The center provides Hopkins employees the support and tools they need to make a difference—to patients, coworkers and health care professionals. As part of its mission, the center also features the extraordinary talents of the faculty and staff of the top-rated hospital and the Schools of Medicine, Nursing and Public Health to advance the science of safety. The center also offers educational and technical assistance programs to health care organizations worldwide.
Quality and safety must be embedded in every organization’s systems, culture and policies. And this is what we are learning at Johns Hopkins: Old ways of doing things do not work with today’s environment. The health care team requires new skills and tools to empower, lead and sustain a quality-focused organization.
We hope to become your partner in developing those skills and tools.
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