During my first year of medical school, I joined Mount Sinai’s student High Value Care
Committee (sHVC). SHVC is a student-led organization focusing on finding innovative ways to
bring high value care by improving quality while reducing costs. Over the course of a year, we
designed our own quality improvement initiative and learned more about hospital operations in a
specially designed extracurricular course. Our QI project utilized a multifaceted, multipronged
intervention to improve sleep hygiene in hospitalized patients and helped put in perspective how important it is to always consider patient safety and satisfaction.
Throughout my first two years of medical school, the topic of patient safety has been
absent from the pre-clinical medical curriculum. I want to attend Telluride to learn more about
how to be a positive deviant. It’s easy to become preoccupied with day to day details, and forget to listen to patients and continually think about how treatments and systems can be improved. By learning from future colleagues’ stories, I hope to return to medical school feeling rejuvenated and empowered to keep rethinking, assessing and changing therapies in order to continually improve patient care and satisfaction. Hearing experiences from others on how to identify and speak confidently about causes of error, particularly my own, will greatly improve my advocacy skills and help my future patients.