Academy for Healthcare Improvement

In 2003, the Institute of Medicine defined five core competency areas pertaining to quality which should be integrated into health professions education: patient-centered care, interdisciplinary teams, evidence-based practice, quality improvement, and informatics.¹ These domains provide great starting points around which to organize educational material pertaining to quality. Following the lead of the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses initiative,² we have added a sixth subject domain - patient safety. Although we understand that significant overlap in these domains exists, we hope using these broad categories to organize the material will allow you to locate appropriate curricular content more quickly. - The AHI Peer Review Editorial Board

• Case Learning
• Delivering Patient-Centered Care
• Focusing on Quality Improvement
• Patient Safety
• Practicing Evidence-Based Medicine
• Using Information Technology
• Working in Interdisciplinary Teams

AHI also recommends MedEdPORTAL (www.aamc.org/mededportal), a free online publishing site and dissemination portal developed by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) to support health educators and learners as they create and use on-line teaching materials, assessment tools and faculty development resources. As an internationally available service, MedEdPORTAL facilitates sharing of high quality peer-reviewed educational material and promotes collaboration and educational scholarship across institutions. Examples of MedEdPORTAL publications include tutorials, virtual patients, cases, lab manuals, assessment instruments, faculty development materials, etc. MedEdPORTAL publications cover the continuum of medical and dental education (i.e. undergraduate, graduate, and continuing medical and dental education).

¹Institute of Medicine. Health professions education: a bridge to quality. The National Academies Press; Washington, D.C., 2003.
²Crononwett L, J Barnsteiner, J Johnson, D Sullivan. Quality and safety education for nurses. Nursing Outlook 2007; 55:122-31.