ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on some general strategies that office-level health-care leaders and others can use to help them successfully implement and monitor quality improvement (QI) initiatives. It lists several straightforward strategies that healthcare supervisors can employ to make their departments more efficient and effective. Office-level leaders at small healthcare organizations, and even those at larger firms that face resource-related challenges, might not be able to call upon the services of credentialed continuous improvement (CI) practitioners or fully staff QI teams. The chapter describes a multistage process that consists of five basic steps, IPPIM in short. The five basic steps are the ideas generation stage, the presentation stage, the planning stage, the implementation stage, and the monitoring stage. The IPPIM methods correspond closely to the key CI phases, which include identifying the problem or issue, coming up with a plan of action, analyzing existing practices, designing and executing improvements, and evaluating and reevaluating the implementation process.
