Physician Leadership Development Program

Fundamentals of Performance Improvement and Change Management

Summary

The Physician Leadership Development Program will equip physicians in the Department of Medicine with the skills and knowledge needed to excel in leadership roles. The program is tailored to address the unique challenges and opportunities faced by leaders in medicine in today’s healthcare system. This course offering focuses on foundational education and training in process improvement strategies and skills for leading people and teams through change in a Learning Health System.

Program Participants

This course is for emerging physician leaders, defined as individuals with a track-record of taking initiative and effectively serving as an informal leader to advance practice, policy, or department culture. Leaders will be trained in cohorts of 16-20 physicians.

Program Delivery

This 14-week course will include the following learning contexts:

• Classroom teaching with seven biweekly 90 min. sessions (10.5 hours total)
• Self-study on-line modules with approximately 14 hours of total content time
• Project-based learning under the guidance of PI experts (hours project-dependent)

Project Selection

Projects will be proposed by course participants with final selection by program sponsors based on relevance to organizational goals, strength of commitment of key stakeholders, and appropriateness of the team identified. Qualifying projects:

• Must be led by 1-2 Washington University faculty member from the DOM.
• Should address a meaningful improvement opportunity in clinical operations with a focus on areas such as quality of care, safety/preventable harm, throughput, operational excellence, physician behavior, etc. Projects involved in enhancing research productivity are also welcome.
• Have realistic goals that can likely be achieved within a 4-6-month time frame.

Key Dates

Jan. 7	General information session for potential candidates
Jan. 21	Program candidates and project proposals due for second cohort
Feb. 4	Project scoping finalized for selected teams
Feb. 11	Classroom training begins Class dates (5:00 – 6:30 pm): 2/11, 2/25, 3/11, 3/25, 4/8, 4/22, 5/6
May 20	Final project presentations