Improvement Area: Whole System Quality

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Whole System Quality

Whole System Quality is a more holistic approach to quality management that integrates quality planning, quality control, and quality improvement activities across the organization, supported by leadership practices that foster a culture of learning.

Despite major advances in health care, many health care systems around the world are troubled by the same set of quality and safety challenges, including the all too common “reactive quality” approach that does not yield transformational change. 

In contrast, the IHI Whole System Quality approach is more proactive, holistic, and strategic, helping organizations anticipate and mitigate risk and integrate their quality activities. Whole System Quality informs an organization-wide, strategic approach to quality and organizational transformation. 

Whole System Quality is based on three interrelated quality activities — quality planning, quality control, and quality improvement — that allow health systems to develop the structures and capabilities needed to sustainably move toward better meeting customer needs, reliably eliminating quality and safety defects, and building true resilience in the system.

When successfully deployed, Whole System Quality shifts a health care organization from a position in which the quality department comes to the “rescue” when an event occurs, to one that is proactively identifying risk points in real time and mitigating them before an event occurs.

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Whole System Quality

Enhance Your Knowledge and Skills to Improve Whole System Quality

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Whole System Quality

Free Resources and Tools to Improve Whole System Quality

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Improvement Area: Whole System Quality

Whole System Quality: Achieving Organizational Transformation

Health systems that have implemented the IHI Whole System Quality approach align their quality projects to an overarching organizational strategy, enabling them to anticipate and proactively meet patient needs and create true value-enhancing care experiences. With decades of global experience in building better systems of quality and safety, IHI can help accelerate your organization’s transformational journey using the Whole System Quality Diagnostic.
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Join Us at the IHI Forum, December 8–11

Dedicated improvement professionals from around the world are convening at the IHI Forum on December 8–11, 2024, to tackle health care's most pressing challenges. Please join us!

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IHI Forum