CHIP Program Makes Quality Improvement A Priority

For over 20 years, the Children’s Hospital Immunodeficiency Program (CHIP) has been providing comprehensive, coordinated, family-centered care for children, adolescents, young adults and pregnant women living with HIV, affected by or at risk for HIV. They also provide vital care to infants born to women living with HIV and to parents of children living with HIV.  The multidisciplinary CHIP team is dedicated to providing state-of-the-art care that meets the medical, social, psychological, developmental, and nutritional needs of their diverse group of clients.

In 2015, CHIP was formalizing and enhancing their quality improvement (QI) efforts and wanted expert guidance on the best way to accomplish that goal. They chose to partner with HealthTeamWorks^® to achieve the broad programmatic culture shift necessary to become more QI-oriented and create meaningful and sustainable change within the organization. Their HealthTeamWorks^® training series included several engagements with key stakeholders within CHIP to learn about leadership and cultural transformation and how it drives continuous QI. Team leaders also learned about QI methodologies, with additional sessions within the group to promote consumer engagement. After these larger trainings, a HealthTeamWorks^® QI expert attended several meetings to provide real-time feedback and one-to-one mentoring support around embedding QI tools and process into organizational workflows.

Molly Weinstein is CHIP’s Quality Improvement Coordinator and enjoyed the experience of working with HealthTeamWorks^®. “One of the greatest takeaways from the training is that change doesn’t happen overnight, and you have to celebrate the small wins,” she says. “If you take it one step at a time and implement smaller, manageable changes, the overall end result is much better than if you tried to tackle a big change all at once.”  Molly is also still using the tools and resources provided during the training like the PDSA Cycle (Plan-Do-Study-Act), process maps and priority matrices. QI, she says, has become a positive part of CHIP’s culture. “The training allowed us to understand our strengths and weaknesses in a positive rather than a negative light. We started this journey with a group focus, and now much of my individual job responsibilities focus directly on QI,” she reports. “I think that focus speaks to the value we place on QI as an important tool to help us continuously innovate and create better programs to serve our community.”