Achieving program alignment using PDSA rapid improvement cycles

This oral presentation will review the University of Oklahoma Health Science Center’s Masters of Health Administration program’s experience using a wide variety of continuous quality improvement tools in the academic arena to create new mission, vision, values (MVV), and competencies and ensure that they are properly aligned. 

Our program, which is situated within the University of Oklahoma’s CEPH-accredited and ASPPH-member College of Public Health, was the first site visit in 2013 for the Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Management Education (CAHME) and also the first program being evaluated under the new criteria.  The site team provided valuable corrective guidance on our mission, vision, and values (MVVs) and our competency alignment. 

Our oral presentation will describe our program’s innovative approach to using rapid improvement cycles combined with Plan-Do-Study-Act, published literature about stakeholder involvement, and consensus-building methods to create and adopt new MVVs and competencies and ensure that they were very strongly aligned.  Combining industry-accepted methods with academic-based theory in an educational setting proved to be an innovative and productive way to rethink the alignment of our program.  That improvement was externally validated by CAHME through our successful results on our program’s progress reports and by our stakeholders through interviews and discussions. 

Hearing the discussions at the 2015 ASPPH Annual Meeting and the 2015 Association of University Programs in Health Administration (AUPHA) Annual Meeting, we know that our experience and model will be extremely useful to other programs.  While we developed it for our health administration program, we strongly believe that our methods will be valuable to any public health program or school seeking an efficient improvement process. 

Finally, in addition to presenting our process, our oral presentation will also provide an analysis of the process, complete with a description of difficulties and directive guidance for other programs.