The Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality’s Global Collaboration’s team strives to expand patient safety and high-quality health care at home and around the globe.

As the consulting arm of the Armstrong Institute, we work with like-minded organizations that share the Armstrong Institute’s vision of a health care system that harms less, wastes less and consistently provides high-quality, respectful care.

We are clinicians, performance improvement experts, researchers, administrators and health care professionals.

Our Expertise

• Patient safety
• Patient- and family-centered care
• High-reliability organizing
• Quality improvement
• Leadership and management
• Preventing infections and complications
• Surgical safety and quality
• Teamwork training
• Medication safety
• Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program (CUSP)
• Lean Sigma
• Human factors engineering
• Health care quality metrics
• Clinical analytics
• Organizational learning
• Evaluating patient safety and quality improvement efforts
• Clinical communities

Contact Us

Our Services

Global Collaborations offers both short-term and multiyear engagements, with services tailored to meet your needs. Contact us to discuss your goals.

• Organizational Board-to-Bedside Assessments

  Our Board-To-Bedside Assessment method is based on the peer-to-peer model that the nuclear energy industry has used for decades to achieve high performance in the face of complexity and constant risk. Over several days, a team of Johns Hopkins experts performs an on-site assessment of patient safety, quality and patient experience.

  We meet with leaders, quality improvement staff members, front-line clinicians and others to assess your organizational environments and priorities, and identify potential areas of improvement.

• Consulting for High Reliability

  Becoming an ultra-safe, high-performing organization doesn’t occur by accident. It results from deliberate leadership decisions and behaviors that turn your mission statement into a living, breathing reality for all employees. The Armstrong Institute works with organizations to fix their focus on the pursuit of zero harm.

  We can help your organization to:

  • Treat patient safety, quality and patient experience with the same rigor and discipline as it treats financial performance
  • Ensure that everyone across your organization knows the goals, understands how their work contributes to meeting them and receives performance feedback
  • Provide employees with the knowledge, skills, time and resources to achieve their goals
  • Give teams both accountability for results and support to do better
• Consulting for Lean Sigma

  On-site and remote consulting services to:
  

  • Identify and eliminate waste in health care delivery, including reduced patient wait times, faster processing of medications, decreased risk of medication errors ,less inventory and more patient-focused processes.
  • Discover powerful methods for optimizing flow and reducing waste while eliminating defects. Apply concepts and tools to healthcare-specific scenarios.

   

• In-person and Online Learning Experiences
  ​

  We can help you develop a cadre of employees, from the front lines to top patient safety and quality improvement leaders, who have the skills, concepts and knowledge to help meet your objectives through our in-person and online learning experiences. Following the Armstrong Institute’s three-tier learning model, we can help prepare your employees to succeed in their roles improving care.

  • In-person workshops from one to five days at Johns Hopkins or your organization
  • Online learning programs that can be custom-bundled to meet your goals
  • A fellowship providing future safety and quality leaders with training and mentorship, plus guidance in completing original improvement projects
• Workshops
  ​

  Our offerings are constantly evolving. Current programs include but are not limited to:

  • Patient Safety Certificate Program
  • Comprehensive Unit-Based Safety Program (CUSP) Workshop
  • TeamSTEPPS® Master Training Program
  • Lean Sigma Green Belt Certificate
  • Lean for Healthcare
  • Human Factors workshop
  • Design Thinking Workshop
  • Science of Safety
  • Friday Night at the ER®

  View Our Offerings

• Fellowships
  ​Participants in our leadership development program receive key concepts and skills needed to drive change in their organizations, while working closely with Johns Hopkins mentors to complete original projects in patient safety, quality improvement or patient experience. Participants learn to evaluate their projects’ impact on clinical practice and get assistance in publishing the results. Fellowships can be delivered remotely, in person, or through a combination of both over 10 to 12 months.
• Observerships
  ​Get an up-close look at the operations throughout Johns Hopkins Medicine that are aimed toward eliminating preventable harm through our Observership Program. Typically held over several days and tailored to your organization’s interests, these experiences allow small groups to shadow safety and quality teams, visit clinical areas, and interview key personnel.
• Implementing the Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program (CUSP)
  ​Too often, frontline staff see the safety hazards in their care area but don’t know how to mitigate them. We can help you to empower those caregivers by launching and sustaining Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program (CUSP) teams. CUSP provides training, an improvement toolkit and executive support that helps units and clinics to take on local safety issues. Since its creation at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, CUSP has become a cornerstone of national and international patient safety improvement projects.
• Other Services
  • Safety culture survey administration, analysis and debriefing
  • Adverse-event reporting, analysis and action
  • Clinical and departmental dashboards
  • Performance on publicly reported safety and quality measures
  • Infection prevention training