The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) hosts the annual IHI Forum, a conference that has been the home of quality improvement in health care for over 30 years. In prior years, the Scientific Symposium was a standalone pre-conference event featuring the science of improvement in health and health care. In the early days and years of the COVID pandemic, the Scientific Symposium transitioned from an in-person pre-conference event to a fully virtual event, first as a pre-conference event and then running in parallel with other IHI Forum virtual events. This year marks the first year in which the Scientific Symposium will be fully integrated within the in-person IHI Forum.

The event takes place from Sunday, December 10 – Wednesday, December 13, 2023, in Orlando, Florida. The Scientific Symposium track features 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.

Sessions at the Symposium include:

• Results-based work from the field applying improvement science and methods across a wide range of health and health care topics, including patient safety, health equity, large scale change and Whole System Quality, and maternal and neonatal health. Presentations will include both oral and poster sessions.

• Methods-focused sessions on new and foundational scientific approaches to improvement and 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.

Participants in the Scientific Symposium track will interact with colleagues and share what has been learned from applying scientific methods to health and health care improvement, discuss challenges in applying and disseminating scientific approaches to health and health care improvement, and build shared learning of how to apply scientific methods to improve health and health care as well as how to improve and expand the methods, themselves.

The presentations were selected from 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 are published in this supplement.

Marianne McPherson

Senior Director

Institute for Healthcare Improvement