Hospitals in pursuit of excellence

Leading Improvement Across the Continuum: Skills, Tools and Teams for Success

As health care leaders implement diverse improvement projects, from reducing hospital-acquired infections to reducing obesity prevalence, they must identify the appropriate strategies for success across many different settings. This guide provides two new frameworks, the Improvement Continuum and the Leadership Action Model, for conceptualizing and planning improvement activities.

The Improvement Continuum (click here to download the graphic) describes four categories of improvement activities: topic or microsystem, care coordination, defined population and community health. For each of these categories, the framework describes the skills, tools and teams that lead to successful improvement efforts. The guide also includes a Leadership Action Model, a framework for how to use the Improvement Continuum. Equipped with these frameworks, leaders will be better able to design and implement improvement efforts of varying scope across diverse topics.

The slide presentation for this guide is found here.