Background

Hosted by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), the IHI Scientific Symposium aims to attract the best work in the science of improvement in health and health care. The event takes place on Thursday, December 15th, 2022, during the virtual track of the IHI Forum. The conference aims to attract high quality scientific work and a community of improvement researchers and practitioners who come together to explore how improvement science and methods can be used to effect meaningful change in health and health care. The IHI Scientific Symposium focuses on learning – what worked, what did not, and what can others learn from those lessons and apply to their work?

Sessions at the Symposium focus on a broad array of topics in health and health care. Our keynote and methods sessions will have a particular focus on opportunities related to maturing and deepening the sciences of improvement, including strengthening connections with related disciplines (e.g., implementation science, program evaluation). Attendees will learn about new ideas for designs, successful implementation demonstrations, opportunities to more deeply center equity in improvement work, and cutting edge evaluation and research methods.

The conference features a mix of keynote presentations, interactive methods sessions on new and foundational scientific approaches to improvement, and oral presentations (top-rated oral abstracts are published in this journal) from our community of quality improvers and applied researchers. The oral and poster sessions showcase either:

• Applied Improvement: Applications of scientific methods to health and health care improvement; or

• Improvement Methods: developing the methodological basis of improving health and health care.

The 20 oral presentations were selected from all the abstract submissions through a peer review process that ensured each abstract was reviewed by multiple reviewers. For those authors who gave permission, the abstracts of the selected oral presentations and featured posters are published in this supplement.

Marianne McPherson

Senior Director

Institute for Healthcare Improvement

Program

Acknowledgements

On behalf of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, the hosts would like to thank the individuals whose contributions have made the 2022 IHI Scientific Symposium a success, especially in such a challenging year and amid the extraordinary circumstances that 2022 has presented. Particular thanks are due to the abstract reviewers, without whose efforts we could not have accomplished a Symposium of this quality: Matthew Anstey, Pierre Barker, Johanna Figueroa, Tina Foster, Mara Laderman, Lauren Macy, Richard McClead, Marianne McPherson, Lloyd Provost, Marina Renton, Rebecca Steinfield, Paul Sullivan, Mike Taigman and David Williams. Finally, we offer special thanks to Pierre Barker, Matt Berry, David Coletta, Jill Duncan, Johanna Figueroa, Christopher Herpel, Niñon Lewis, Sara Valentin, Catherine Warchal, and the team at the British Medical Journal, who dedicated countless hours to the development of this year’s program so that we might feature the valuable and generous research shared with us this year.