What is Breakthrough Series Collaborative? (30 September 2020)

Summary

In this article, Life QI looks in more depth at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) Breakthrough Series Collaborative model, which was first launched in the mid-1990s and has been supporting improvements in healthcare quality ever since.

Learning within a collaborative is thought to be one of the most successful methods that leads to quality improvement and system wide change - and the Breakthrough Series Collaborative model is one of these models. Described by the IHI as a ‘Collaborative Model for Achieving Breakthrough Improvement,’ the Breakthrough Series has been designed to help organisations by creating a structure in which interested parties can easily learn from each other and from recognised experts, within specific topic areas where they want to make improvements.

The model supports the thinking that: “sound science exists on the basis of which the costs and outcomes of current health care practices can be greatly improved, but much of this science lies fallow and unused in daily work. There is a gap between what we know and what we do.” It is this very gap that the Breakthrough Series Collaborative aims to close by creating short-term ‘learning systems’ and teams built from people from different healthcare settings.

This article summaries the Breakthrough Series Collaborative and gives tips and tools on how to create a  Breakthrough Series Collaborative for your organisation.

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