Innovation or Improvement:

Sarrah Lal, MBA is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at McMaster University who focuses on building individual, team, and institutional capacity for innovation and entrepreneurship. 

Shawn Mondoux, MD is an emergency clinician who leads several quality improvement and innovation initiatives at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton. 

Both of us are heavily invested in change initiatives that help our organizations create socioeconomic value for our communities and achieve the Quadruple Aim: improve health outcomes, enhance both patient and clinician experience, and reduce ever-increasing healthcare costs. Quality improvement (QI) has been described as “the systematic approach to making changes involving rapid cycles of change that lead to better patient outcomes and stronger system performance” (Batalden & Davidoff, 2007). While concepts such as continuous quality improvement (CQI) processes and Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles are commonly used in quality improvement practices for healthcare, the heavy bias towards incremental consensus building approaches often yields small-scale adjustments that are slow relative to the pace needed to solve quickly escalating challenges in healthcare (Locock, 2003). In our studies of complexity science, quality improvement, innovation development, and entrepreneurship literature, we have considered a merging of thinking across these disciplines. 

We intend to create an approach to problem-solving in healthcare that will address challenges QI professionals and healthcare organizations have in developing responsive change initiatives that still have strong organizational buy-in. 

We are curious to bring together a mastermind group (Gisondi et al, 2018) to hear your thoughts on innovation versus quality improvement initiatives as well as to understand specific challenges you face in identifying problems, building consensus, and sustaining change in your quality improvement initiatives.