Understanding how people experience our systems can provide deep insights into how the system needs to change and can inspire specific changes to make. Empathy interviews are one important way to access and learn from the user experience.

This ~10 minute video provides a broad overview of the foundations of improvement science, including:

Systems Thinking, Understanding Variation, and The Improvement Journey

Participants will understand the purpose and parts of Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles, review a PDSA cycle used in practice, and develop the Plan section for a cycle to be tried in a system.

Learn about the purpose of Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles and appreciate the deductive and inductive parts of PDSA cycles. Viewers will reflect on who is participating in the improvement journey as well as what methods might be used to source change ideas.

Learn about the Model for Improvement, including the use of the ‘three questions’ to organize improvement efforts. Viewers will appreciate the value of the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle in generating learning about their systems.

Ordered Bar Charts and Pareto Diagrams help teams focus, providing knowledge on where to change, what issues are common and for who in the system change is needed.

The ability to distinguish real change from random variation in our data is critical to any improvement journey. Run Charts can help bring objectivity to these assessments.

Analyzing process is not always intuitive. Understanding what questions to apply to process maps can help.

Seeing the system creates important insights for teams focused on reducing errors, improving reliability and increasing quality. Process maps are useful tools to help teams get started.

This video reviews the basic outline of what should be included in a project charter.

Sustaining change in systems is hard. This session focuses on five elements of systems important to address when sustaining redesign efforts is needed.

Sometimes finding a solution to our problems requires innovative thinking. Structured creativity techniques can be powerful mechanisms for helping us identify new ideas for changing our systems.

This lecture on process improvement theory and application introduces the PDSA (plan—do—study—act) model and describes its application in healthcare settings.