Healthcare leaders face mounting pressure to deliver exceptional patient outcomes while controlling costs, reducing errors, and building resilient systems. This micro-credential equips physician leaders and healthcare executives with the frameworks, methodologies, and leadership skills needed to drive meaningful improvements in quality, safety, and operational efficiency. This self-paced micro-credential includes over 30 hours of content, with all courses filled with actionable takeaways.
What You'll Learn:
Through five focused courses, you'll explore the foundational elements of quality improvement theory and their evolution into today's consumer-centric healthcare environment. You'll learn practical change management principles that help overcome resistance and sustain improvement initiatives. Dive deep into high reliability science to understand how human factors, system design, and organizational culture combine to either prevent or enable safety events. Master systems thinking to design, test, scale, and maintain quality improvement systems that deliver lasting results. Finally, develop sophisticated problem-solving capabilities that leverage both individual analytical skills and group dynamics to tackle complex healthcare challenges.
The micro-credential emphasizes practical application throughout. You'll examine real case studies of successful change initiatives, explore behavior-shaping factors used by high reliability organizations, and learn to leverage stakeholder relationships to scale improvements across your organization. The curriculum draws connections between quality theory, safety science, systems design, and the leadership behaviors required to embed these principles into organizational culture.
Action Plan:
The micro-credential culminates in developing a comprehensive action plan where you'll apply your learning to a real quality, safety, or efficiency challenge in your own organization. You'll conduct a gap analysis, establish baseline measurements, design evidence-based interventions using frameworks from the coursework, and create an implementation roadmap complete with performance metrics, resource requirements, and accountability mechanisms. This capstone ensures you leave the program not just with knowledge, but with a concrete strategy to drive measurable improvement in patient outcomes, safety performance, or operational efficiency.
Who Should Enroll:
This micro-credential is designed for physician leaders, quality improvement directors, patient safety officers, clinical department chairs, and healthcare executives responsible for building cultures of quality and safety, leading improvement initiatives, or transforming organizational performance in an increasingly complex and competitive healthcare environment.
Courses Included in This Micro-Credential:
Fundamentals of Physician Leadership – Quality
Practical Principles of Change Management
The Science of High Reliability
Create Systems for Quality
Leading Problem Solving
Action Plan
Learning Objectives:
1. Analyze quality improvement frameworks, high reliability principles, and systems thinking methodologies to diagnose performance gaps and design evidence-based interventions that address root causes rather than symptoms in complex healthcare environments.
2. Apply change management strategies and problem-solving approaches that build stakeholder engagement, overcome resistance, leverage group dynamics, and create the relational capital necessary to implement and sustain quality and safety improvements.
3. Evaluate organizational culture and leadership behaviors using high reliability principles to identify opportunities for behavior-shaping interventions, incident reporting enhancement, and culture change that prevent errors and improve patient safety outcomes.
4. Design and test quality improvement systems by defining system components (stocks, inflows, outflows), creating effective testing environments for iteration, incorporating balancing feedback mechanisms, and developing strategies to scale validated improvements across the organization.
5. Create a comprehensive action plan that addresses a specific quality, safety, or efficiency challenge in your organization, including baseline measurements, measurable targets, evidence-based interventions, implementation steps, resource allocation, and accountability mechanisms that ensure sustained progress and demonstrable impact on patient care outcomes.
Disclosures
Planner Disclosure: The planners (American Association for Physician Leadership® staff) for this activity have no relevant financial relationships with commercial interests to disclose.
Faculty Disclosure: The faculty for this activity have no relevant financial relationships with commercial interests to disclose.
Accreditation
The American Association for Physician Leadership® is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) to provide continuing education for physicians.
Designation
The American Association for Physician Leadership® designates this enduring material for a maximum of 30 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.
Key Dates
Registration Start Date: October 14 2025
Registration Close Date: October 14 2028
Access to Course Expires: 365 days from purchase date of course.
