WIHI: Health Care in Motion: Making Sense of a Moving Picture

​Date: May 26, 2016

Featuring:  

• Don A. Goldmann, MD, Chief Medical and Scientific Officer, Institute for Healthcare Improvement
• David M. Williams, PhD, Executive Director, Institute for Healthcare Improvement

Last month, researchers at Johns Hopkins called upon the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC) to rethink how it classifies the country’s “leading causes of death.” The authors argue that deadly medical errors, conservatively estimated at over 250,000 annually, should be included in the rankings — which would make medical errors the third leading cause of death in the US, just after heart disease and cancer. It’s a provocative idea AND it raises the question: What difference would this make? Would it accelerate efforts to reduce preventable patient deaths? Would it make the problem more prominent and more intolerable, adding urgency to research and public policy?

IHI's Chief Scientific and Medical Officer Don Goldmann joined us on this WIHI to take a look at the current state of quality improvement and the new value-driven initiatives that have health care organizations undertaking unprecedented levels of financial risk and undergoing rapid transformation. He was joined by IHI's improvement guru, Dave Williams, to engage the audience on why it can be so hard for the US health care system to measure patient-reported outcomes, the proliferation of measures, and whether "value-based" payment can work.