Background
Hosted by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), the IHI Scientific Symposium takes place on Monday, December 7th, 2020 as a pre-conference day of the IHI Forum. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects, the Symposium and Forum are held virtually this year. The IHI Scientific Symposium aims to attract high quality scientific work, focused on the improvement of health and health care, and to foster dialog and share learning among participants.
In the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become increasingly clear that the health and health care fields need evidence to be produced, evaluated, and applied more rapidly than ever. Moreover, the inequitable impact of COVID-19 across racial groups in the United States has brought to the forefront the existence of widespread, longstanding, systemic inequities. Therefore, this year’s Symposium includes a special focus on:
How improvement methods can contribute to the rapid production of practical evidence, and
Applying improvement methods to dismantle structural racism and inequity.
The IHI Scientific Symposium features a keynote speaker, method sessions, as well as poster and oral presentations from our community of quality improvers and applied researchers. The 16 oral presentations and 16 featured posters were selected from over 130 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
