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UPMC
Image of doctor talking to woman holding toddler.
Image of doctor talking to woman holding toddler.

About UPMC Quality, Safety, and Innovation & Our 14 Key Principles

UPMC is well-known in our local area, across the U.S., and around the world. We are especially good at helping people with tough and complex health problems.

When you choose UPMC, you expect top-quality, life-changing health care. The care you get is a mix of many things. This includes how skilled our doctors, nurses, and staff are and how caring our hospital environment is.

Health care changes quickly, so UPMC always checks how well we're doing. We always look for ways to do better and put in place big plans to improve.

The Wolff Center

The focus of the Wolff Center at UPMC is to make sure:

  • People get the best care.
  • We keep getting better at what we do.

The Wolff Center supports improvement and quality standards by:

  • Establishing standards for quality care and safety, using innovation, best practices, and the latest technology.
  • Enhancing the overall employee experience and supporting all UPMC employees in making quality care and patient and employee experience their top priorities.
  • Providing ongoing educational programming and resources focused on improving the quality of your care at every point.
  • Using data analytics to measure and benchmark our performance.
  • Partnering with people we care for and their families to ensure that we hear their voices.
  • Spearheading operational excellence initiatives to improve your care and experience, ensuring they're robust, sustainable, and effective.

Our goals

You and your family members are at the center of what we do at the Wolff Center. To achieve this goal, we:

  • Set high standards of performance and reliability.
  • Make operational and clinical excellence a priority.
  • Commit to safety and delivering the best possible outcomes.
  • Invest in innovative care solutions and maintain a culture of quality.
  • Above all, treat you with dignity, respect, and kindness.

Our goals include:

  • Creating an environment that encourages care team and staff members to advocate for and eliminate preventable problems and threats to your health.
  • Actively engaging you and your family in your care for the best experience.
  • Working to reduce the cost of your care through improvement programs.
  • Measuring our outcomes in valid and meaningful ways and trying to always improve in all we do.
  • Striving for excellence, comparing our performance against key publicly available measures.

Our 14 key principles

The Wolff Center is the key connection point of quality, safety, and improvement at UPMC. We partner with colleagues across our entire system to improve how we delivery health care.

These 14 key principles guide the Wolff Center at UPMC:

  • The people we serve are at the forefront.
  • Kindness matters.
  • Design simplistically.
  • Design for the rule and not the exception.
  • Reduce waste.
  • Passion for improvement.
  • Connect and support.
  • Transparency is a must.
  • Teamwork is the only approach.
  • Excellent data makes good decisions easy.
  • Always evidence-based.
  • Fail fast and move on.
  • Relentless commitment to safety.
  • Less is better.

The Beckwith Institute

Supporting these efforts is The Beckwith Institute, which provides funding for innovative ways to improve care at UPMC through:

  • Frontline Innovation Program. This program seeks practical, hands-on solutions to improve the care experience. It celebrates and takes to the next level the best qualities of the patient-provider relationship.
  • Clinical Transformation Program. The focus of this program is to apply clinical research methodology to discover breakthroughs and new treatments, tools, and processes.