Residents and fellows in UNMC’s Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology shared the findings of five quality improvement projects undertaken during 2024-25 at a symposium June 13.
A quality improvement project is a focused and structured effort to achieve better outcomes of a given process. Some of the earliest formal quality improvement initiatives originated in the manufacturing industry with the goal of avoiding production defects and improving efficiency, and similar quality improvement efforts have since been adopted by the health care industry. The goals of health care-related quality improvement projects are often to increase patient safety and to avoid the waste of limited resources.
Resident and fellow involvement in quality improvement efforts is mandated by the ACGME Common Program Requirements. Participating in at least one Quality Improvement (QI) project during their time in the program is a graduation requirement for each trainee. Residents/fellows are encouraged to generate ideas for a quality improvement project themselves, but faculty members may also identify projects and invite residents and/or fellows to participate. Projects must be related in some way to patient care and be done under the guidance of a faculty advisor.
Emcee for the symposium was Aleh Oleg Bobr, MD, an associate professor whose work includes serving as medical director of the department’s Quality and Process Improvement Unit.
The winning project was determined by a vote of faculty members, as well as the presenters’ resident and fellow peers, who attended the symposium—held this year at the Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center. The top project, “Evaluation of molecular testing of CSF specimens in the UNMC Microbiology Lab,” was by Scott Stevenson, PhD, and Chunyi Zhou, MD, PhD, both clinical microbiology fellows.
Other presenters included:
- Pranav Renavikar, MBBS, a surgical pathology fellow: “Academic institutional review of outside pathology material by experienced gynecologic and breast pathologists results in improved patient care outcomes in a significant number of cases: a detailed study of the frequency and type of discrepancy with follow-up data”
- Kayla Hoerschen, MD, and Ahmed Sabri, MD, hematopathology fellows, with two projects: “Improving detection of MYC rearrangements” and “To enrich or not? Improving FISH for multiple myeloma”
- Ketav Desai, MD, a molecular genetic fellow: “CDKN2A FISH probe validation”
- (via video) Thomas Auen, DO, a third-year anatomic and clinical pathology resident, “Pheochromocytoma and paraganglioma reporting improvement”
