Training Courses in Improvement Skills

RITE

Stanford Medicine offers the Realizing Improvement Through Team Empowerment (RITE) course twice per year. This introductory course is intended for faculty, trainees, and staff wishing to learn more about improvement work. Multidisciplinary teams apply with a problem in their practice area that they are passionate about making better for patients and families.

RITE trains learners to use Lean methodology to make local improvements in practice. This standardized approach includes:

• Clearly stating a problem statement
• Explaining the background that makes others feel the pain of the problem
• Setting a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timebound goal
• Measuring the current state
• Analysis the contributors to the problem
• Identifying the key drivers that if addressed would improve the current state
• Linking interventions to those key drivers
• Establishing a plan to sustain improvement

Many RITE projects emerge from the Improvement Capability Development Program annual project proposals and all projects align with operational priorities. Neurology faculty members, trainees, and staff interested in learning more about RITE may contact Carl Gold.

Of note, the Clinical Effectiveness Leadership Training (CELT) course, a more time-intensive introductory course with emphasis on leadership training, was retired in 2023.

ACIS

In September 2020, the Stanford Medicine Center for Improvement launched the Advanced Course for Improvement Science (ACIS). ACIS is open to Stanford faculty and staff who have graduated from RITE or CELT. Unlike those introductory courses, individuals—and not teams—apply to participate in ACIS. This intensive, 8-month course includes approximately 128 hours of course work on topics ranging from design thinking to project management to adaptive leadership. There is extensive reading and project work required outside of the course work. Teams of participants meet weekly to discuss these readings and their quality improvement projects. Carl Gold and Laurice Yang had the privilege of participating in the first cohort of ACIS in September 2020 - April 202. Zach Threlkeld participated in the 2024-2025 cohort. A full list of ACIS alumni is available here. If you have completed RITE or CELT and are interested in learning more about ACIS, please contact Carl Gold.