Presenting your QI Project

"Pitching" your QI Project

Presenting the idea for a research, QI or other quality project is a skill worth developing.  A "pitch" is a succinct summary of a project idea with just enough detail to convince your listeners that you know what you're doing, while keeping the presentation brief and to-the-point.

For a QI project, there are a few highlights to hit:

1. Title of your project - think about the intervention and the outcome.

2. BRIEF background - just enough to set the stage. Remember to consider both the overall burden of the health condition and its local relevance. Culminate with the goal of this project.

3. Brief description (and images) of your process flowchart and problem analysis. End this part with the specific part of the process you want to improve.

4. Brief description of the intervention and why you think it will work (should be based on evidence).

5. Describe the specific outcome(s) you will measure to determine whether your intervention worked.

Example QI Pitch Presentation:

Final Presentation Basics

In a presentation about quality improvement - you want to discuss the whole process - not just highlight the results.

Remember, the RESULTS of most quality improvement activities aren't generalizable - it's the story of the methods and processes and challenges that you went through that make your project interesting to a wider audience.

Balance that with the need to present well and be concise.

Final Presentation Content

In your presentations, please cover the following items.  You'll remember them from our first discussion on Quality Improvement Models.

FOCUS-PDSA

• Find an opportunity to improve

  • What big picture problem did you decide to work on, and (very briefly) why?

• Organize a team

  • Who was on your team? 

  • How/when did you conduct your meetings? 

  • Describe team members' contributions.  A (brief) story, if you have one, would be good here.

• Clarify the process

  • What process did you focus on that leads to the big picture problem?

  • What did the original process look like?

• Understand sources of variation

  • What were your thoughts about how the original process didn't work?

• Select an intervention

  • Make a case for why you chose that intervention to address your process

• Plan

  • What were your original plans for baseline data collection, intervention, and post-intervention data collection?

• Do

  • Describe the implementation - how did it go?

  • Did you have to change anything?

• Study

  • Describe your analysis (how you did it)

  • Describe what you found (results).

• Act

  • What are the next steps your team will do with this intervention? (adjust, continue, abandon, etc.)

  • What would be a good next step for the future? (another intervention for that process?  another process to address the big picture problem?)

  • What are your recommendations for the next group to work on?

• Lessons Learned

  • Advise the next group on what worked well and what needs improvement in the team QI process

Addendum: Continuous Quality Improvement Based on Scorecard Measures

How does this presentation differ when you have a scorecard quality metric you're tasked with improving?

1. FOCUS

   1. Most of this section is still applicable.  You didn't "Find" an opportunity as much as select one.

2. PDSA

   1. Each cycle (even the small ones) should have its own slide for each iteration.  

   2. If you tried a small intervention with one nurse/doctor pair, and it went well - that's one cycle.  The next PDSA cycle is with more doctors, or more patients, etc.  

   3. Many of you looked at different outcome variables in your PDSA cycles (that weren't the bigger scorecard measure) - just define these in your slide.

3. Conclusion Slide

   1. Have a graph/table with your month-to-month scorecard scores for your metric, and some notations indicating when your PDSA cycles occurred.  This will help us track which interventions we think were effective.  If there were other things that could have accounted for the scorecard measures (like a pandemic, etc) then note when those happened too.

4. See the new, made-up Powerpoint demo below.

Presentation Method

How many slides?

• rough guide: 1 slide for every minute you have allotted to talk. 

• If you have a 15 minute presentation slot that asks for 10 min of presentation and 5 minutes of questions - that means 10 slides...not 15.

The content above is at least 10 slides. 

• A title slide and a couple of additional slides for the Study section might be ok, but pay attention to the presentation ideas below and to your time limit.

• Don't cram information onto slides to reduce slide count.  Better to have a greater number slides and less content per slide - within reason.

Tell the story to the audience. 

• Use your slides to outline what you're saying and provide graphics, but don't read your slides.

More about Presentations

See the videos and example slide show below.

Avoiding Death by Powerpoint - main points:

1.  One message per slide

2,  Use contrast on your slides to focus people on your point

3.  Use (text) size to focus people on your point

4.  Avoid sentences (use 1-2 word bullets instead)

5.  Use a dark background

6.  Use a maximum of six elements (total - pictures, words, etc) per slide