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Every year, nearly 100,000 people die from medical errors in the United States. Some estimates suggest that nearly a third of the more than $3 trillion the U.S. spends on health care is wasted on low-value, unnecessary and ineffective care—a pattern that is replicated across the world.
Now, Harvard Medical School is offering experienced clinicians an opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to develop a culture of change that can transform and improve care delivery within clinics, provider organizations, and health care systems around the world.
Harvard Medical School’s Office for External Education is launching a new Master of Healthcare Quality and Safety (MHQS) degree program, and the first class of students will begin in the 2018-2019 academic year. Applications are now being accepted.
The program is designed for clinicians who aspire to leadership positions in health care quality, risk management and patient safety. Applicants should hold an advanced degree and possess at least three years of clinical experience. Ideal candidates include physicians, registered nurses, nurse practitioners and allied health care professionals.
Improving safety and efficiency
Improving the safety, efficiency and value of patient care is crucial to improving the quality of health care and to building sustainable, equitable health systems around the world, according to studies by the National Academy of Medicine, Institute for Healthcare Improvement, World Health Organization and other organizations.
In recent years, global health care leaders and clinicians have begun developing this new field focused specifically on quality and safety improvement.
“The exciting thing to me about teaching the quality improvement mindset is that it gives future leaders the skills that will allow them not just to solve today's problems but to see risks that are coming in the future and build systems that will address them before they even have a chance to do harm,” said Anjala Tess, program director for the MHQS degree program.
HMS is an especially rich environment for this kind of education, Tess said, because there are many different systems and structures within the school’s affiliated hospitals. Students taking the HMS course will be exposed to a broad spectrum of approaches that work in diverse environments. They can also immerse themselves in a community of peers and mentors who are also dedicated to improving the quality of care delivery.
Tess is HMS associate professor of medicine, associate chair for education in the Department of Medicine, and director of quality improvement and safety for graduate medical education at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Tess developed and directs the hospital’s Department of Medicine quality and safety curriculum that has now trained more than 500 residents. She also directs the HMS Fellowship in Patient Safety and Quality and has worked on quality and safety improvement projects and training for nearly two decades.
Accelerating development
The new master’s program, which Tess helped design, is intended to accelerate students’ learning and development process. It combines classroom learning that covers the knowledge, skills and frameworks that leaders in quality and safety improvement must have with exposure to best practices as they are currently deployed in Harvard-affiliated hospitals. Students also gain practical experience as they work to analyze, understand and solve aspects of a safety or quality project.
“This is a fantastic opportunity for clinicians with an advanced degree and at least 3 to 5 years of clinical experience to learn skills, gain experience and build the mindset necessary to become leaders in safety and quality improvement,” said David Roberts, HMS dean for external education.
The curriculum focuses on five key areas: operational quality and safety, informatics, leadership, quantitative approaches, and risk. To bring all of these elements together, each student will work with a professional mentor in a clinical environment in one of the Harvard-affiliated academic medical centers. Students will also complete a capstone project in which they will apply the tools, strategies and methods derived from didactic courses as they address an evidence-based safety or quality issue.
“Students in the program will have the unique opportunity of learning and collaborating with operational leaders and cutting-edge scholars in the field of safety and quality improvement at Harvard Medical School and our world-class community of affiliated hospitals—and also of joining a global community of fellow students, alumni and faculty who are dedicated lifelong learners,” said Ajay Singh, HMS senior associate dean for global education and continuing education and director of the HMS Master of Medical Sciences in Clinical Investigation degree program.
“This program adds to Harvard Medical School’s long tradition of combining knowledge learned in the classroom, discovery generated in the laboratory and insights gained in the clinic to constantly improve both the health of individual patients and the health of the overall systems of care delivery while also moving that tradition forward with new models of pedagogy and scholarship,” said David Golan, HMS dean for basic science and graduate education.
For more information about this new degree program, including dates of upcoming in-person and online information sessions about the program, visit the Master in Healthcare Quality and Safety program website.
