Despite major advances in health care, many health care systems around the world are troubled by the same set of quality and safety challenges, including the all too common “reactive quality” approach that does not yield transformational change. 

In contrast, the IHI Whole System Quality approach is more proactive, holistic, and strategic, helping organizations anticipate and mitigate risk and integrate their quality activities. Whole System Quality informs an organization-wide, strategic approach to quality and organizational transformation. 

Whole System Quality is based on three interrelated quality activities — quality planning, quality control, and quality improvement — that allow health systems to develop the structures and capabilities needed to sustainably move toward better meeting customer needs, reliably eliminating quality and safety defects, and building true resilience in the system.

When successfully deployed, Whole System Quality shifts a health care organization from a position in which the quality department comes to the “rescue” when an event occurs, to one that is proactively identifying risk points in real time and mitigating them before an event occurs.