Health care quality improvement fluency: The secret sauce to improving quality improvement.

The goal of quality improvement (QI) in healthcare is to improve patient outcomes. An easily supported, simple, and desirable objective. Fortunately, over the past 20 years, healthcare has “embraced” quality improvement, but that journey is remarkably incomplete. QI has infiltrated mainstream thinking for many clinicians and healthcare administrators; however, using the words and speaking the QI language does not always translate to the effective execution of improvement processes that lead to better outcomes.