Article

Although quality improvement (QI) is increasingly recog-nized as integral to better patient outcomes and system improvement, most physicians in the United States lack knowledge and skills in improvement science.1,2 Recogniz-ing this gap, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education requires residency programs to “ensure that resi-dents are integrated and actively participate in interdisciplin-ary clinical quality improvement and patient safety programs,”3 so trainees can develop competence in systems-based practice and practice-based learning and improve-ment. The Institute of Medicine’s report, Health Professions Education: A Bridge to Quality, advocates that health care professionals be proficient in team-based QI and that their competence in this area be adequately evaluated.2 Graduate medical education program directors are challenged to inte-grate such training into busy clinical training programs with increasingly restrictive duty hour requirements. Given the variability in training program structures, a one-size-fits-all approach to integrating QI is inappropri-ate.4-8 Widespread dissemination of QI graduate education models will not only allow residency training programs to share their successes and challenges9 but also will provide a resource for educators to adapt tried and tested QI educational experiences to fit their unique needs, strengths, and focus areas.10 It is also important to evaluate if educa-tional interventions translate into improvements in the rigor of the QI processes as well as improvements in health care delivery.11 Consistent with the experiential focus of residency training and the program’s goal of team-based, experien-tial, and longitudinal project-based learning, the authors’ goal was to create a curriculum to integrate exposure to the fundamental concepts of improvement with the incorpora-tion of these concepts into a resident’s repertoire of clinical 448927 AJMXXX10.1177/1062860612448927Sh aikh et alAmerican Journal of Medical Qualit