About UPMC Quality, Safety, and Innovation

Locally, nationally, and worldwide, UPMC is known for delivering excellence and innovation in health care, particularly to patients with challenging and advanced medical problems.

When you choose UPMC, you expect to receive quality, life changing medicine. Your care is the sum of many factors — from the expertise of our doctors, nurses, and supporting staff to the nurturing environments of our hospitals. In the fast-paced health care field, UPMC believes it is vital that we constantly assess our performance and look for ways to improve.

The Wolff Center at UPMC is the voice of quality patient care and improvement at UPMC. We partner with UPMC leadership, hospitals, physicians, departments, and insurance colleagues to improve the way we deliver health care to our patients by:

• Establishing standards for quality care and safety, using innovation, best practices, and the latest technology.
• Supporting all UPMC employees in making quality care and patient 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.

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

• Frontline Innovation Program — focusing on ideas that can result in improved bedside care and clinical practices today.
• Clinical Transformation Program — supporting projects that can impact the future through improved shared decision making with patients and through research that can directly impact patient care at the bedside.

Working together, we look for opportunities to do things better, every day, to provide you with better care, fewer errors, less cost, reduced tests, faster recovery, a smoother transition home, and improved long-term outcomes.

Our 14 Key Principles

The Wolff Center at UPMC is the coordinating and connecting function of high quality and safety care and improvement. We partner with colleagues systemwide to improve health care delivery for our patients and members. The Wolff Center at UPMC is guided by these 14 key principles:

• Patients and members 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