An Asset-Based Quality Improvement Tool for Health Care Organizations: Cultivating Organizationwide Quality Improvement and Health Care Professional Engagement

In the United States, health care organizations are often biased toward deficit-based quality and safety improvement techniques, such as incident reporting and peer review. However, deficit-based techniques may elicit negative sentiments from frontline health care professionals, causing disengagement and adverse event underreporting. To complement deficit-based quality improvement, our institution developed an organizationwide asset-based quality improvement tool. Inspired by asset-based quality improvement methodologies such as appreciative inquiry, Safety-II, and positive deviance, this tool facilitates the identification and analysis of clinical excellence. Resultant best practices and quality improvement projects are then propagated throughout our organization. Ultimately, asset-based quality improvement tools are logistically and technologically feasible for organizationwide deployment, and they potentially improve care quality and team culture. Health care organizations should consider adding these tools to their quality and safety improvement initiatives.