Resource Center

Wait times are frustrating — for busy patients and busy clinicians.

At The Dimock Center in Boston, at least once every week, lack of a prior authorization meant that providers had to deny a patient a Suboxone prescription. Sometimes this happened as many as five times in a week. And every time, it meant a now unhappy patient waited for as many as four hours at the clinic. Staff members at Dimock, meanwhile, were overwhelmed and frustrated with the process.

​Preety Das and Hannah Zhu, two medical students from the University of Cambridge in England, conducted a quality improvement project to improve communication within the emergency department. In this interview, Preety and Hannah discuss some of the obstacles and barriers they encountered, the reception they received from hospital staff, and the perspective they now have on quality improvement.

Victor Montori, MD, MSc, a Professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, is pioneering the concept of shared decision making. Dr. Montori, who was a special interest keynote speaker at IHI’s 24th Annual National Forum, explains the nature and practice of shared decision making in these videos.