2021 Quality Improvement Symposium

 

The symposium is a showcase of initiatives happening throughout East Carolina University’s Health Sciences Campus and Vidant Medical Center/Vidant Health related to quality improvement, patient safety, population health, and interprofessional practice. The goal of the symposium is to provide academic and community physicians, health professionals, health care teams, residents, fellows, and students the opportunity to present their work in systems improvement and practice redesign to an audience of peers and health system leaders.

2021 Unified QI Symposium Winners Announced
The fifth annual Unified Quality Improvement Symposium was held virtually on Feb. 3. The symposium showcased 33 projects related to quality improvement, patient safety, population health and interprofessional practice from ECU and Vidant Health.

Meeting successfully in a virtual environment, with more than 170 attendees, the symposium provided academic and community physicians, health professionals, health care teams, residents, fellows and students the opportunity to present their work in systems improvement and practice redesign to an audience of peers and health system leaders. As a testament to the on-going dedication of our organizations to improvement, the program had more submissions and more participants than ever before.

Accepted presentations were categorized into four categories—quickshot podium, podium, poster and works in progress poster presentations. The symposium’s award for outstanding quick shot podium went to Pamela Cowin, PhD, RN, for her presentation “SWARM: A Regional Health System’s Intervention Approach to Addressing COVID-19 Outbreaks in Nursing and Adult Care Homes in Rural Eastern North Carolina.” The award for outstanding podium presentation went to Jennifer Sutter, MD, for her presentation “Screening for Depression and Anxiety in Adolescents with Chronic Medical Conditions Cared for at the ECU Physicians Pediatrics Specialty Clinic.” Outstanding poster was awarded to Kelly Bear, DO, for her project, “Improving CPAP Before Endotracheal Intubation in VLBW Infants.” Both Dr. Sutter and Dr. Bear are recent graduates of the Teachers of Quality Academy program.

The symposium offered two concurrent learning sessions. “Leading Change” from Robin R. Hemphill, MD, MPH, Chief of Staff, Cincinnati Veterans Affairs Health System, offered discussion on why change is hard, identifying leadership skills that may help manage a team and exploring tools to help create change in an organization. In “By What Method? – How Understanding Variation Transforms Performance” by David Williams, PhD, Senior Improvement Advisor, Institute for Healthcare Improvement, participants discovered a practical and tactical approach to applying data for learning and improvement to anything.

Symposium Objectives
At the end of this symposium, participants will be able to:

1. Explain the quality improvement process as illustrated through inpatient, acute care, ambulatory practice and interprofessional improvement projects.
2. Describe how the quality improvement process can impact clinical care and system’s based practice.
3. Provide a platform for participants to describe how they would change rules, habits, policies, or procedures to improve care delivery.