A decade ago, leaders at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt set out to empower and equip staff across disciplines with the tools to improve patient care and outcomes.
At the time, employees relied on external training programs. Leadership, however, recognized their teams had the expertise and demand to build an in-house program. The founding team of the Quality Academy included: Autumne Harding, MSN, APRN, Meg Rush, MD, MMHC, Barron Patterson, MD, Dave Johnson, MD, Caroline Epps, RN, and Jan Cotton.
What began in fiscal year 2017 at Monroe Carell as a small pilot program with 11 participants has evolved into a robust, yearlong, project-focused training program designed to teach quality improvement (QI) methodology to clinical, administrative and operational staff and leaders across Vanderbilt Health. Many of the projects exist as part of current care practices today.
On June 10, Vanderbilt Health’s Quality Academy marked a decade of training leaders across the organization to improve care, advance safety and to drive change. Graduating their 10th cohort of 24 individuals, the Quality Academy now has an alumni class that is 175 strong across the system.
“It’s incredible to look back on the past 10 years and see the impact these projects have had on so many patients,” said Harding, Associate Vice President for Quality and Safety at Monroe Carell and High Reliability at Vanderbilt Health. “From day one, our vision was to train people who would then go on to train their own teams, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing.”
Each year, the Academy accepts about 28 participants from Vanderbilt Health’s hospitals and clinics to represent a cross-section of clinical and non-clinical roles, including nurses, physicians, surgeons, environmental services staff, medical assistants, child life specialists and others.
“The beauty about the improvement methods we teach is that they can be used across disciplines and even outside of health care,” said Johnson, Professor of Pediatrics and Hospital Medicine, Director of Quality for the Department of Pediatrics, and Medical Director for Inpatient Quality and Patient Safety at Monroe Carell. “When people start to realize there is a science to quality improvement and begin to approach quality improvement with rigor and structure in addition to their passions to do better, the bounds are truly endless.”
Over the past 10 years, several participants have gone on to present their Quality Academy projects in publications and at national conferences. These efforts highlight the exceptional quality and safety work at Vanderbilt Health, while further reinforcing the system’s strong reputation as leader in quality.
Examples of quality improvement projects include initiatives like decreasing adverse medication events; improving adherence to safety checks; and decreasing time to EKGs in the adult emergency department.
During the Quality Academy, participants attend monthly interactive sessions where they learn about making small tests of changes, key driver diagrams and statistical process controls charts.
Participants envision, create and lead a team with guidance from a mentor to complete a robust quality improvement project focused on improving one or more of the following: patient outcomes; hospital or departmental goals; value by reducing waste; efficiency; and U.S. News & World Report reporting.
Etoi Garrison, MD, PhD, is a graduate of the most recent cohort and was grateful for the opportunity to create a more intentional focus around her work in maternal-fetal medicine in a structured setting. Her QI project: Preventing hypoglycemia for women with diabetes in labor. She focused on smart aims and interventions, using QI methodology, with the goal to reduce episodes of low blood sugar among women with diabetes during labor by standardizing care practices.
The project team updated electronic medical record order sets, adjusted glucose monitoring timing and added nutritional options. These interventions led to a measurable drop in hypoglycemia rates, showing sustained improvement over several months. Garrison’s work is ongoing.
“As clinicians we use data every day but do not really have the opportunity to focus on how it can be best used to evaluate a clinical problem and implement changes that actually improve patient care,” said Garrison, Associate Professor of Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology.
“Often it is not really the data itself but the people behind the data that drive change in big hospital systems. The academy offers a wonderful opportunity for me to identify very small but meaningful system-level interventions that actually improve the quality of care we provide for patients in my department. I couldn’t be more grateful to Dr. Patterson, Dr. Johnson and the QA team!”
During graduation, each of the 24 participants gave two-minute presentations on their quality improvement projects, followed by a poster session where they shared more detailed information with Vanderbilt Health leaders. Many alumni also returned to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Quality Academy.
“As a graduate of the inaugural cohort, I’ve grown alongside Quality Academy — from learner to mentor to faculty and leader,” said Ashley Ried, MMHC, BSN, RN, Magnet Program Director. “I’ve seen its ripple effect in action — developing leaders who empower their teams and embed improvement across our organization.”
Because of the growing demand to join the Quality Academy, which now has a waitlist, the team has also added a monthly Quality Academy Boot Camp.
The 10th cohort graduating class members are: Claire Wells, Chris Eastburn, Kayla Kuehn, Maddie Risley, Melanie McAfee, Joy Crook, Thomas Rains, Katherine Bennett, Merrill Stoppelbein, Amy Guerrero, Laura Nicar, Bailee Thompson, Laura Culwell, Bo Stubblefield, Julia Peredo, Meagan Davis, Liese Harris, Stephanie Kelley, Tonya Vanover, Kerri Shingleton, Elizabeth Birdwell, Megan Cyrulik, Etoi Garrison and Sandy Alexander.
The 11th cohort of the Quality Academy will get underway in August. Applications for the 12th cohort will open in October and close Feb. 28, 2027.
