This year, there are going to be nearly 6,000 attendees at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) annual Health Care Improvement Conference in Orlando, FL, USA.

This year the IHI’s Triple Aim takes on new complexity, since the leadership team has set an even loftier set of goals for us to strive towards: “Care better than we’ve ever seen… Health better than we’ve ever known… Cost we can all afford… For every patient, every time.”

The question is how do we get there? What are the actionable ideas that we can all take home and implement tomorrow that will move us as an industry toward a more sustainable future?

At the conference, speakers will be sharing their success stories, hard learned lessons, and ideas for where to go next. Topics will cover many applications, ranging from rerouting emergency room frequent flyers, to reducing inpatient length of stay, to empowering diabetes patients, to better managing bed capacity.

Inspiration always abounds at the IHI forum, but it is much harder to take these great ideas and make them actionable in your own hospital. Yes, there are best practices, but they must be customized to each local patient population, existing facilities, and even by department. This is where simulation can be helpful – it is a low-cost, virtually risk free environment in which to test out ideas for quality and process improvements to see how they will integrate into your own system.

The President of IHI, Derek Feeley, said it best when he talked about this year’s conference theme: Strategize. He said “making the right decisions is more important than ever”, and he is right. We must not just make decisions that are good enough – we must take our analysis to the next level and make decisions based on both evidence and experience, not only instinct.

So if you have an Actionable Idea – but don’t yet have leadership buy-in, need to build a business case to support the cost of implementation, or want to double check that it will work the way you are hoping…. Stop by the SIMUL8 Booth and let’s build a quick simulation together next week.

Then take the idea home and make the change that you know is the right decision!