Barry Muninger, Kansas Rehabilitation Hospital, will talk to our club on Friday about High Reliability Organizations, in the Bradbury Thompson Alumni Center.
 
The Oxford English Dictionary defines reliability as the quality of being trustworthy or of performing consistently well. While an aspiration for any business, certain organizations that operate in complex, high-risk environments have taken it a step further. Most recently, healthcare organizations have begun taking quality improvement lessons from organizations with impeccable performance records despite operating in hazardous conditions and applied them to their own efforts to become what is referred to as a High Reliability Organization.
 
While current trends in healthcare quality certainly have real-life implications on each of us, the basic characteristics of High Reliability Organizations can also be applied to improvement efforts in virtually any profession. This presentation will give a brief overview of how the theory of High Reliability came to be, what it means to healthcare organizations, and High Reliability lessons that can be implemented in almost any line of work.