Submitted by Madge Kaplan
Every now and then, as IHI’s Director of Communications and the host and producer of WIHI, I get the opportunity to bring forward issues health and health care improvers are particularly wrestling with. These are issues born of one of the hallmarks of quality improvement – innovation – but they can easily fall between the cracks and fall off schedules because sometimes the implementation requires a fundamental change in mindset and attitude among health care providers most of all. Victor Montori’s leading edge work on Shared Decision Making (SDM) and Minimally Disruptive Medicine (MDM), and the contributions from his team, fits into a tension we often come back to on WIHI: whether health care is serious about getting to know and respond to the needs and real lives and contexts and experiences of patients or pay lip service to the same while going about its own business.
I’m hopeful it’s the former. IHI’s “What Matters” initiative, which shares many of the same principles as MDM, is gaining traction; Don Berwick’s recent call for an Era Three for the health care quality improvement movement, has reminded many of the centrality of the provider/patient relationship that must be protected especially in the midst of health care transformation; and there are new concepts such as “co-production” that are helping to frame this brave new world of doing with patients rather than doing to them.
So, let’s be optimistic that the several hundred who tuned into the live broadcast of the January 28 WIHI with Dr. Montori, Kasey Boehmer, and Dave Paul from the KER Unit at Mayo, along with IHI’s Andrea Kabcenell, are going to think differently about the next discussions they have with patients with chronic conditions. It was also a treat to have Dr. Montori live in the WIHI studio, so much so we did some additional videotaping and produced these equally inspiring clips. Let’s keep the conversation going!
Madge Kaplan is the Director of Communications for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
