title: Curriculum development: the venous thromboembolism quality improvement resource room.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The role of the hospitalist has evolved over the last decade, with hospitalists increasingly being asked to lead systems-based initiatives to improve the quality of inpatient care. The educational strategy of the Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM) includes development of practice-based resources to support hospitalist-led improvement in clinically important measures of hospital care quality.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  To develop a resource at the SHM Web site to present quality improvement (QI) principles for systems-based care in the hospital and to help individual hospitalists improve specific patient outcomes.
  
  
  METHODS
  The SHM defined the role of the hospitalist in QI, performed an assessment of the educational needs of hospitalists, and executed a Web-based educational strategy to address these needs. The organization identified the most common cause of preventable inpatient deaths, hospital-acquired venous thromboembolism (VTE), and prioritized the need to improve prophylaxis.
  
  
  RESULTS
  This new resource at the SHM Web site presents principles for conducting QI in the hospital. To enable learning that is practice based, the VTE Quality Improvement Resource Room (QI RR) features Ask the Expert, an interactive discussion community, and an original Improvement Workbook, a downloadable project outline and tutorial that hospitalists can use to guide and document steps in an effort aimed at reducing hospital-acquired VTE.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  This QI resource serves as a template for the development of subsequent hospital-based resources. User feedback will refine the QI RR and its format so that similar offerings can target other significant inpatient problems. Additional research is needed to evaluate learning and the clinical impact of this quality improvement resource on hospital performance measures and patient outcomes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. Smckean@partners.org
authors.forename: Sylvia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: McKean
authors.forename: Jason
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Stein
authors.forename: Greg
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Maynard
authors.forename: Tina
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Budnitz
authors.forename: Alpesh
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Amin
authors.forename: Scott
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Johnson
authors.forename: Larry
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wellikson
mesh_terms: D003479:Curriculum / Q000592:standards* / Q000639:trends; D006295:Health Resources; D020445:Hospitalists; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet / Q000592:standards* / Q000639:trends; D005791:Patient Care / Q000592:standards / Q000639:trends; D016730:Program Development / Q000379:methods / Q000592:standards*; D012955:Societies, Medical / Q000592:standards / Q000639:trends; D013923:Thromboembolism / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000628:therapy