One of my teaching roles involves reviewing clinical quality improvement (QI) projects led by students in our Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) program. The classic QI method involves looking at regular reports from a clinic or hospital unit, graphing the data either monthly or weekly, and making changes with the hope of seeing a sharp improvement on the graph right around the time that the interventions were put into place. For example, a student might measure the percentage of hospitalized patients who have a fall after surgery (generally considered to be a preventable adverse event) on a weekly basis. If the rate is generally stable, but it goes down after the student initiates some provider training and a new procedure to screen patients for fall risk, and then the rate stabilizes at the new lower level going forward, it’s reasonable to assume that the student’s QI project caused the improvement. Regular measurement is the key: In the words of management consultant Peter Drucker (i...