Seeking Excellence

Defining excellence: next steps for practicing clinicians seeking to prevent diagnostic error

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) released its report on diagnostic errors in September, 2015. The report highlights the urgency of reducing errors and calls for system-level intervention and changes in our basic clinical interactions. Using the report's controversial definition of diagnostic error as a starting point, we introduce the issues and the potential impact on practicing physicians. We ...

Ensuring excellence in centers of excellence programs.

Studies have found associations between better outcomes and a variety of structural and process criteria that help explain the wide outcome variations that occur across hospitals. In response, Centers of Excellence programs have been developed by multiple third parties. Despite this, programs have yielded disappointing results and can have unintended consequences. To outweigh potential harms, o...

Celebrating excellence

Excellence is a talent or quality, which is unusually good and so surpasses ordinary standards. Ophthalmology in India today has reached a level that is considered to be on par with the best in the world. Moreover, a lot of the credit for this goes to the founding ophthalmology institutes in India that have been imparting quality training and education to ophthalmology trainees over the years. ...

Public health disciplinary excellence.

As a mature and productive discipline, public health needs three things. The first two requirements of public health excellence are familiar to us. First, we need access to the public health field so that we can, from experience, identify the problems that need to be resolved, and we need to maintain our access to the field so that we can gather our data. Second, we need skills in appropriate r...

Network of Excellence