ABSTRACT
The story of quality improvement (QI) at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center stretches over two decades, representing a journey of accumulated organizational learning, change and customization of quality approaches, methods and tools (see Box 4.1). During this time the US healthcare fi eld in general has gone through a similar period of experimentation with various innovations and approaches to quality, but, interestingly, with less impressive results. As a system, we are still left with the challenge of how to spread and sustain QI throughout healthcare and make continuous improvement a normal and common feature of the typical organization providing health services,1 and in this regard we may have much to learn from the Cedars story.
