New year, new courses

Happy new year, everyone!

I know you're probably still recovering from last night's celebrations. But I wanted you to know that the IHI Open School just published three brand-new quality improvement courses. The courses will be required for our basic certificate of completion. And like all our online courses, they're free for students -- you just need to register with IHI.org.

Here's a quick snapshot of our latest offerings:

Quality Improvement 104 ("Putting It All Together: How Quality Improvement Works in Real Health Care Settings"): The first three IHI Open School quality improvement courses introduced you to the fundamentals of improving health care. In this course, you're going to see how two real organizations actually used these methodologies to improve an important aspect of patient care. You'll start by learning the four phases of an improvement project's "life cycle": innovation, pilot, implementation, and spread. Next, you'll delve deeper into the theory of spreading change - both the foundational work by sociologist Everett Rogers, and IHI's Framework for Spread.

Quality Improvement 105 ("The Human Side of Quality Improvement"): If you want to improve a complex system, you'll probably have to convince the people around you to do things differently. But a change that seems sensible and beneficial to you may feel threatening to others. In this course, you'll learn why culture change is crucial to the success of many improvement projects. You'll discover the most common reasons people resist change, and then you'll practice responding in a way that mitigates that resistance. You'll also learn how new ideas typically spread through a population, and what you can do to help different parts of a population adopt a change. Finally, you'll learn different ways to motivate people -- and which methods are most likely to be effective in your setting.

Quality Improvement 106 ("Level 100 Tools"): This practical course will teach you to create and use three essential tools for improvement: PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) templates, measurement planning forms, and run charts. Working through step-by-step tutorials that put you right in the middle of health care scenarios, you'll learn how to plan a series of tests, collect data, graph your results, and interpret what your graph is trying to tell you. This course is fully hands-on, so get ready to practice what you learn along the way. (Note: You'll need Microsoft Word and Excel to make the most of this course.)

Ready to get started? Drop by our learning management page.