Lessons Learned

People – Closing the Gap between Practice and Policy

1. Innovation and reform has to be arranged by leaders – they are not automatic;
2. Leaders have to be persistent, actively supportive and creative – resources are scarce for clinically driven improvement;
3. If improvement is to be actualized, all those involved in the everyday processes of care need to be involved;
4. The health care workforce is a generous creative resource for retooling the system of care; and
5. If the system is going to be changed in meaningful transparent ways, it has to be changed where the work is done with the input of the people that do the work;

Administrative and Technologic Infrastructure

6. Support for quality improvement varies across the region’s hospitals;
7. Communication across departments varies across the region’s hospitals; communication among clinical, analytic, and IT staff can be improved, especially around understanding key definitions.
8. Hospital data definitions, collection and storage processes vary enormously; and
9. There is a challenging trade-off between availability of clinical data and protection of patient privacy.